Waking up

I wrote earlier about my weird inability to judge time.  (and portion . . . but that's a bonus for all the hungry humans in my life.)

Another side effect of the grieving I've been doing is that I either have not been paying attention to anything or anyone around me for a few months now . . . or someone (cough, cough ESK) is gaslighting me.

Earlier this week, we were talking about the annual "Parade of Homes" and Christmas Show that is a fundraiser in our community.  ESK and other members of the SMLF will set up a table and sell handicrafts.  For the past several years, one of the visitors has been a couple who we all know, superficially.  They are a curious couple . . . and tend to over share.  Like, the year the wife demonstrated her many hiding places for tucking a gun on her person . . . and then invited ESK to feel how warm the gun that came from her thigh holster was from her body heat.  And, that was the mildest of the options.

In the conversation this week, I mused about what other sorts of over-sharing might happen this year, when ESK commented that the Christmas Show wouldn't be the same without the pistol-packin' mama.  I asked why she wouldn't be there, and how did ESK know this already?

And, ESK informed me that she'd died.  Just a few weeks after my friend's death.  AND I HAD NO RECOGNITION OR RECALL of this fact.  ESK swears that she told me when it happened.

Phenom, bless his heart, says she's gaslighting me.  One of the quirks of our relationship is that we rush to inform each other of deaths.  Major celebrities . . . friends . . . relatives of people we knew 20 years ago.  Phenom says that surely, if ESK had told me of Over-Share's death, I would have shared that info. at home.

Still, it's a tad weird to wonder what else I might have totally missed out on this fall.