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A yellow sash across the donut-hole middle silently demanded peace.
“It wasn’t that heavy. Eat a fucking sandwich sometime, you rail.”
I couldn’t tell if she was being commiserative with me or conspiratorial with him.
Mercy snapped pictures of the walls and ceiling, each flash a bit of lightning, foretelling larger storms to come. She dropped the grayed developing photos onto empty chairs.
If hope is believing there will be one more moment of joy, then despair is knowing there was a final one—”
I was the hole in the donut of the conversation happening around me.
The erasure of familial and cultural memory of any one individual was simply a function of time.
When people become desperate, it’s human nature to assign blame to someone.
“Hope is believing there’ll be another moment of joy, and despair is knowing there won’t be one more.
He tottered and stooped through the foyer toward us as though grief was a city built upon his back.
While Mom cruelly sat in food judgment (note: She was quick to take offense and a world champion grudge holder, but I admired her bluntness, righteousness, and unwavering loyalty.
There was nothing else and I was nothing else but my aged, coagulated thoughts, pestle-and-mortared by time into a thinning, gritted incoherence and inchoate loss, and I wanted the nothingness, wanted to be snuffed out not only from now but from having ever been, wanted to be freed from the tyranny of regret, pain, fear, memory, and hope.
and the worst part would be knowing you would see it again in the next nightmare and in all the ones after that and then finally in the interior eternity before you closed your eyes for the final time.
his continued questioning would lead to saving me from myself.
we offered generalized apologies, ultimately as meaningless as a handshake greeting because we weren’t willing to say what it was exactly we were sorry about—and still, what exactly was I sorry for?
I can now say with some authority that a consequence of experiencing the inexplicable is that it recontextualizes everything that has happened and continues to happen.
I didn’t want to see any more. I couldn’t see any more because I was full. There was no more room in my head for madness.
That’s how we get through most of our days and nights, right? We fumble heedlessly forward into the unseen future, a future guaranteed to one day cut us down.
He couldn’t see it. I could tell. He would never release the version of me he kept.
His name was never spoken; simply “your father,” with an emphasis on your, as though I were due some ownership or blame for who he was.
That was the curse of being a parent: your child was forever who they once were, or at the very least the adult version of the child would be compared to the kid in whom the parent saw their own best and worst selves. The other half of the curse was that within the adult child’s aging eyes the parent inevitably changed and became someone else, a person in whom the adult child saw their own best and worst selves.
It’s a too-good-to-last feeling.
What if the part you so achingly want to fix, change, banish, or destroy is the part that is fundamentally you?
I say I want to work on my book a little and then get to bed because I have to wake up hearse-early tomorrow, and yeah, that’s a term in the funeral biz, and whoa, my back and everything else is really sore and stiff and I know part of that is my fault because of how self-inflictedly hurt I was this morning after the all-night rock-out and beer binge that left me toadstooling on the floor next to the amp, and without any segue I offer an estimate of how many despair-filled steps we walked within the Dantean hell of the furniture store and then I added 25 percent to my steps total because of
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his hair unburdened and freed from the exhaustion of pretending it is enough to cover his balding pate.
