The story of Huta

I just love reading about large combustion plants all day and the current document I'm working on is just making my eyes bulge out of their sockets while I shart in my pants from excitement. The task of changing the word phosphorus to phosphorous twenty bazillion times a day makes me violently playful (hello, can't you freaky academics have your asses peer reviewed into proper adjective formation?). I'm afraid to bring this beautiful piece of literature home, for fear that it will keep me up at night and not let me put it down and get some much needed sleep. The suspense of how Annex VI on monitoring standards might end is just killing me right now. That is some good shit right there.

But there comes a time in the middle of the day when I'm supposed to be reading mind-numbing nonsense and I'm about 200 pages behind schedule and I just say, fuck it, I've got to put the red pen down, turn away from the arousing chapter on fugitive emissions (which actually sounds rather erotic), and look out my window and think of Dublin.

Yes, Dublin.

You see, not all of my internet uselessness amounts to nothing. My fantasy vacation planning actually landed me a flight to Dublin in October for 60 euro bucks. Not bad. Let's not get into why I'm planning a weekend away in October and it's barely July right now, but it might have to do with fugitive emissions and procrastination.

But Dublin, of course, makes me think of my sister, Huta. Welcome to my tangent-story about Huta.

Huta and I always hated each other. Well, not always. There was a time I remember, a short time, maybe a summer when I was 9 and she was 6 when I took her in and loved her and there was room in our little make-believe world for each other where our imaginations melded together in perfect harmonious child play-- our imaginary worlds of playing house and dress up and school. Before that time and after its short duration, we were separated, our sisterhood (or lack thereof) was at the mercy of divorced parents who could not bear to be separated from all of their children at once, so they decided to separate their children from each other because their empty hearts were more important than our togetherness.

We saw each other on odd weekends and spring breaks and such. We never learned how to deal with each other. We probably barely knew each other. When we coincided living together again we were both too old for imaginative play where anything goes and everything is a potential house-play prop and everything is shared and roles are flexible and can be reversed at whim. I was now an irritable pre-teen and she was a spiteful elementary over-achiever who glared at me through squinted hateful blue eyes that looked just like mine.

Huta copied me but hated me all at once. We were forced to share a room and in order to handle her bothersome and forced company, I cleared out my side of the closet and created a sort of mini room for myself in there – a place to escape from her annoying and ironically hate-filled emulations of me. The privacy of my closet room was good for a few hours where I relished in my own tiny little defined space. But when my sister discovered this valuable piece of real estate she had not been previously not privy to, she promptly emptied out her side of the closet and created her own little special room, where she glared at me from the gap in the closet and whistled and hummed and scratched around and fidgeted and annoyed the living fucking hell out of me and my property value plummeted like a mobile home in a hurricane.

The following years can only be described as Huta and me having bouts of ignoring each other intermingled with waged armed conflict where projectile missiles of coat hangers, flip-flops, or any large blunt objects found on the battleground were launched at each other with the full force of our capacities.

We were eventually granted our own rooms by the wise intervening powers that be, trenches of sorts where our ammunition both real and sentimental could be collected, our cannons could be loaded with insults, where shields could be strapped on, especially over our hearts.

Ceasefires were short-lived and peace was a delicate state always teetering on violent upsurge by either side, especially if a word was uttered in the wrong tone, if a blush-brush or a certain feather pillow went missing, if domestic duties were seen to be unfairly assigned, or if the company of the family cat was perceived to be monopolized. There were various territorial zones one normally respected, but even with these honored fortresses, doors were frequently slammed, bedrooms frequently looted, important artifacts often went mysteriously missing and were later found in foreign garrisons. When diplomacy was engaged, such as with a loud bang with a clenched fist on a bedroom door, it was commonly met with a not-so-statesmanlike, "GO AWAY."

When I turned 18, I moved out of the house and moved in with my older sister who had total and complete control over my military capacities and I therefore did not instigate wars because I knew my military would never stand up against hers. And my younger sister Huta disappeared from my life, for the most part in any practical sense, yet again.

Oh, we would see each other when I went home, gave each other a "hey" or an awkward hug if it had been a really really long time. If I stayed longer than a couple of hours, her icy eyes would form into their usual squinty glare and it was always clear that our peace-treaty could be reneged if either of us so much as breathed wrong. Ignoring each other was easiest.

But then at one point we coincided amazingly by choice, in Dublin, spring of 1999 and I hadn't seen family or home in months, and was homesick as ever. We had a beautiful time together, even though she was kind of an idiot and just when we got bikes to go for a bike ride she had to slam on her brakes and fly over the handle bars like that. But I forgave her clumsiness because I had missed her, surprisingly, and we went for beers together for the first time in our lives. We talked about our dreams and our future and our parents and love.

And then in a small hotel room in Dublin we decided that we needed to have one final battle. And we brought out our best soldiers and put them on the front line, we flexed our muscles and showed our greatest technological advances in sisterly-love-destruction. We raised those old medieval fortifications again and pointed our artillery through the holes and I think I got some really good hits in there and threw the best of the best of my mortal grenades. But it was the final blow instigated by the Huta, the one that has always stayed with me that took down the stronghold inside me:

"You've never given a shit about your family."

And in the midst of my homesickness and longing for precisely family, that arrow got me in the gut and sent me down to die in the mud.

And I never fought the Huta again.

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