Still Time Yet: A True Story

"He was such a dick... Fuck him. I-"

He broke off. His eyes twittered up to me as he caught his own words in his mouth. He considered censoring himself but dismissed the thought.

"I don't even care that I'm ruining my father for you. He wasn't a bad man. He just wasn't a good one sometimes. Here's something you have to understand about men: there comes a time in every father-son relationship. An apex, a turning point. And it happens to varying degrees in every family. There comes a point when the boy says 'I'm not taking your shit anymore. You will never touch me again.' Well my father liked to poke me. He would grow his fingernails out too, so it hurt when he jabbed you in the chest."

He smiled to himself a bit, remembering. The passing of years made fondness possible.

"This time I poked him back. Well, he didn't like that. We went a couple of rounds. So I left. I didn't take a bike, I didn't take the car. I was your age. I didn't know where I was going, I only knew where it was I was leaving from. Every time I saw a pair of headlights, I got the hell off the road. I saw to it that no one knew where I was. I wasn't afraid of... you know. Bad people. I was afraid it would be my family.

"It took me some time before I realized I was heading in the direction of our church. Can you tell we went to church a lot? In my addled brain I somehow thought that the doors would be open, you know, as a safe-haven. Well it occurred to me later that they stopped doing that in the sixties because drunks would sneak in to use the place. I ended up sleeping in a clothes donation dumpster. Actually I don't think I slept that night."

He was sort of huddled over now, the memory forcing him into the child he had to be that night. His claw-like hands gripped each other. The wrinkles in his forehead deepened. I noticed how old my father was actually becoming.

"I walked back in the morning. Twelve miles all together that night. The driveway had both cars parked in it. I was not going back in there to face him."

Laughter at the thought of his teenage decision process.

"So I walked four miles back! I knocked on the church door and the priest let me in. And then he raped me! Just kidding. I called my mother, she picked me up, asked me what I wanted to do. I told her I wanted this not to be happening. I couldn't have that wish. So I went to him. Me. To him. He should have come to me. Prick."

Sullenness now. A cut reopened. He leaned back in the chair, his brow furrowed with pain, regret, betrayal. He was exhausted by the opium of the past. I just sat there watching him. Waves of guilt washed over me. Why had I been allowed to live a perfect life, no cracks, no blemishes. I had escaped early childhood without abuse. Escaped middle school without an eating disorder. Self-harm played no part in my life. Death and terror were foreign to me. I was livid. I'm weak, I thought. I'm soft and naked. The test tube life had prepared me for nothing extraordinary, I could only pity others. What right do I have? I didn't want to live through these things; I just wanted them in my arsenal. I wanted to be able to reach back and say, "Look at the shit I survived. Look how strong I am because of it."

There's still time yet.

Huts and other Musings

According to my calculations, an abundance of houses are for sale in my hometown recently. They beckon to me as I drive by, realizing that I should probably be focusing on the road instead of the trim. Upon being informed that spring and summer are the best times for putting one’s house on the market, I realized that I am guilty of musing at houses a lot more once the warm weather rolls around. Obviously I am incapable of buying a cute little shingled cottage with a large drive way, but my thoughts need to be occupied by something on the way to school or doctor’s appointments or wherever else it is that I stumble to all day. I guess it’s just the simplistic indie vibes in me that long to make my own preserves to shelve in my adorable kitchen, or spend hours choosing the perfect shade of wood floor. Still I have no shame. I hope this counts as an issue worthy of posting because if I had to force myself to write about the flesh eating man from Miami hopped up on bath salts this entry would have been dreadful. 

.....just kidding.

How 'bout my uncanny and most times unwanted ability to notice change only when it has passed? I often become so obsessive over details that I fail to notice how dynamic my life actually is.

As cold as it may seem, tragedy is a socially conditioned behavior. The death of a beloved dog is tragic, while the death of a Midwestern pig is dinner. The brutal car accident in one’s family is devastating, while an I-495 crash is just morning news. However, since we are mentally unable to truly see a situation from the perspective of anyone other than our own, tragedy is completely subjective.It’s always been mysterious to me that we our supposed to value one set of people we know over another set of people we know to be considered good humans. I guess this can be derived from the fact that I've never had great tragedy strike my life. I assume the logical course of action to take if it ever did would be to sever this conditioned attachment in order to move on from the tragedy. It’s also kind of insensitive to view this as a math problem but I’m trying to approach this in the only way I know how. What I’m saying is, there’s no effective way to cope with great tragedy, and I don’t need to live through a plane crash to know how difficult it is. If a disaster occurs outside of my control, how can I expect to control my emotions about the disaster? The key is surviving it, not avoiding it.

Through, not around.

Tar in the Afternoon

How like last summer it is. June's sun unfolds down between the tree branches onto my skin. I sit on my stoop and pour a bottle of water onto the sidewalk where tar is re-liquifying. The water, who has more freedom than I will ever know, almost immediately begins to evaporate into the stale air. Across the street a large black dog watches me waste my drink through eyes of mild arrogance. He shifts his gaze, not wishing to arouse any territorial rage on my side of the street. I rise and stretch my limbs into the toxic dust clouds of summer-stricken suburbia. I stare at the fire hydrant down the road, its cap hacked off my crude young boys who now play half-nakedly in the spray of frigid ground water. An old Cuban man sits in a discarded lawn chair by the street, watching the boys. His wrinkled scowl grows more furrowed every time he is splashed with the water.

A memory slithers into my mind: it is my grandmother washing my mouth out with soap. She had hoped to burn the offending words from my tongue without having to form an actual lecture out of standard child-rearing rhetoric. I sat there, gangly legs dangling, understanding that my grandmother thought she was acting toward the collective relief of the entire community by keeping me from spitting these curse words out of my cocky little head. What she didn't know was that it was that very neighborhood who had taught me to spit those words on serpentine tongue to any that were younger than me. It's a beautiful hierarchy. It has existed for years.