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Sometimes I just wish that the grief would set like cement, because the moments where the reality crashes upon me can be too difficult to bear. I’d rather be stuck in the thick of it, all the time, as real and raw as possible, as if I could get the pain over with.
Tears spring to my eyes and I’m frozen, stunned by the immensity of it all, of the fact that life will keep going on without my dad in it and how fucking unfair that is.
“Papa,” I cry out, my voice breaking and echoing in my ears. I sound like a child, I feel like a child. Oh god, I would do anything to be a child again, to go back, to be with him. I want to be young again, I want to do this over again and get it right this time, I want to tell my mother that I’m not leaving him, that I’m staying with him. “I want to go back,” I whisper hoarsely, my face buried in my hands. “I want to go back to when I was your little girl. I want another chance. I don’t…I can’t move on like this. Not in this world. Not without you.”
“Is that so? You already said I’m surprising.” He laughs wickedly. “You suck up every compliment like a bottom feeder, don’t you?” I feel my face fall. I can’t help it. He’s got me there, one of my biggest fucking flaws, and he already knows it. This life-long incessant need to be complimented, validated, to feel I’m special in regards to something.
“I love you Papa, so much, and I’m so sorry we didn’t get more time together, that I didn’t reach out when I should have, that I thought you’d always be there, like the sun and the moon. I didn’t know the sun and moon could be taken from me, but you were. You are. And I wish I could go back and make it so I stayed with you. I never should have left, I should have stayed.”
“I thought his saying was never trust the living? Which, by the way, he got from Beetlejuice.”
