Broke-Ish [Completed]

Chapter 14

My eye has recovered and my mom lives with me now. She's in the kitchen chanting something over a pot of something else, this is what she does. This witchy lifestyle she's adopted seems to have worked wonders for her as she hasn't aged a minute, in fact she might even look better. So what exactly was my mom doing in Birmingham at the exact moment I happened to be leaving Tim's hotel after my near blind inducing date with Tim. Well, after backpacking around Thailand like a child free gap student. After full moon parties, bargain buckets of alcohol and foot massages on the street. After Buddhists temples, meditation retreats and petting heavily sedated animals in controlled environments. After Yoga practice in India, random food carts and selective food poisoning. After hostels, laundromats, broken bags, and hosting walking tours my mom then made her way to Brazil with loose intentions to travel up to Venezuela, over to Columbia and down to Peru armed with the words "no hablo espanol."

It was in Brazil where my mom met Leonardo 'call me Leo' Ricci, a Swiss Italian man who laughed at and then intervened at my mom's (I can only imagine ) very ridiculous attempts to order a bottle of beer. Leonardo 'call me Leo' Ricci convinced my mom that it was a good idea to leave the warm sands and clear waters of Brazil, abandon any idea of seeing the rest of South America and return to the UK. I want to visit the Scottish Highlands he said and does it really rain every day? Fast forward 2 years and Leonardo 'call me Leo' Ricci has gone and my mom was left to work on a double decker bus turned café, selling breakfast sandwiches and dinner rolls to truck drivers.

According to my mom she was on her way to take one of her regular late night death wish walks down the canal when she bumped into me and she just knew it was fate. So with no apology for her absence over the years we re-directed the taxi and collected her belongings from the top of the double decker bus, which is where she had been living and then came straight to my place.

I thought it would be bad having her in my personal space after not seeing her for so many years but it's not, it's worse. The reasons for this are many in number but for the sake of my sanity I have narrowed them down. The first one is Hector. Hector is my mom's pet iguana. A scaly, ugly, green thing that looks like a foot with tassels, why anybody would want Hector as a pet is beyond me he does nothing but blink and look silly. He annoys me but I don't know why he annoys me which takes my annoyance up a level and the cycle goes on. It's a weird feeling because I'm the last person on earth who wants to be burdened with the responsibility of a pet, the feeding, the walking the showing random pictures to disinterested strangers to prove your love for them. So you'd think one that did nothing and therefore required me to do nothing would be acceptable. But it isn't. I despise Hectors existence almost as much as I hate people checking into hospital on Facebook. I throw a blanket over his silly little glass cage when moms not in.

Then there are the dream catchers to 'protect us from evil spirits'. I don't know how I have survived this far in life without them and I'm guessing my flat was a hot bed for evil spiritual activity as there are eight of them. Eight dream catchers varying in size but equally unattractive and they're not confined to one space either – naturally, I'd expect this to be the bedroom considering that is where people sleep and therefore dream – but no. There's the multicoloured feather looking one by the front door completely throwing off my décor. A thin teal spider webb looking one in the kitchen, above the cooker of all places, guess evil spirits are suckers for the noodles that I eat by the ton. There's a washed out red and brown one, that looks as though it may have been the first dream catcher ever made, hanging in the bathroom. It's colour shines through the shower curtain as if new only to reveal its dull self when I get out, overall it's the most disappointing one yet. Then there's the other the other five darted around the flat in the most unobvious places and I have mostly accepted their existence, they kind of come with the mom package. But if ever I come home and there are wind chimes she's out of here.