Your Tenant

Trigger warning: Emotional Abuse, Family Conflict, Grief/Loss, Neglect, Abandonment, Mental Trauma, Parental Expectations.

Your Tenant

By Aditi Arun 

“Nothing breaks like a heart….the heart of a child that knows only love without knowing what it is. Nothing sullies like a mind of a child, like a white pure cloth sewed with the threads of innocence, that cannot spell or write trauma, let alone comprehend it. There is nothing as tragic as a childhood lost. There is nothing sadder than a little one living on survival instincts and not dreams of cotton candy clouds. Many hearts beat unaware of what it is to be a child. Some lost childhoods with the parents gone, some lost to battle fields that used to be prosperous nations and yours at home…I am sorry… my daughter.”

A long silence follows. Must be hard to apologise for someone like him. Is it even a possible?

“I have always loved you!” Muffled cries escaping my fathers mouth.

“How could I not? You are my child!” Words rolled out in a quite, pale room lit with fluorescent lights casting a cold glow over the space of sterile white walls and floor where silence was disrupted by the rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor. A focal point that has always dominated my life, now dominants the room with single bed in a hospital. Instead for a sturdy, cruel figure towering over me, is a frail figure lying within the crisp sheets neatly tucked in the bed surrounded by array of medical equipment replacing your usual self; an IV stand with clear fluid dripping steadily instead of a clear glass of shiny beer, a monitor displaying fluctuating vital signs and not the telly with shouting sports anchors, fans and men taking off their shirts and running across the gigantic field of green grass, an oxygen mask covering your face that was usually shrouded by smoke that engulfed my senses on any other normal day but today, the faint metallic smell of some antiseptic I cannot pronounce, so sterile in its harshness that has plastered remorse on your face and removing the inutile, smug arrogance it usually carried.

Not one flower other than the bouquet I bought, no photograph or a memento to humanise the space. Why is there no chair? Has no one else visited you or have you thrown it away to push everyone away so that you could be called a “man”? I still can’t sit beside you, can I? Well, it is not surprising, you did drive everyone away. I guess its just me who is stupid enough to return, craving unrequited love of my share.

What have you become? I wonder as I stand frozen, in front of you as I always have. Your eyes empty and not dark as they usually are with no emotion other than contempt of those breathing around you without your permission. Now, laboured breathing fills the room which for the first time is not mine after a good crying session.

With my back against the wall now, I sit crouched on the cold floor. Your face looks blurry. Tears cloud my vision once again as they used to when we locked horns in the middle of the living room as everyone made themselves scarce seeing us. It would always end with your unfounded reasoning of a male chauvinist triumphant over my individual existence. Somehow, you are the only machista that I let win.  

Time feels suspended since I entered this room as though the room exists in a world of its own. It has to be different world because you would never claim to love me in the world that you and I are forced to share by this cruel fate of ours. The lottery that we both lost and ended up as a grudging father and daughter.

Maybe you have changed? I have heard that everything changes with time. Nothing is permanent. Maybe it is true what my brother says, “Time is God!” But am I supposed to believe this? Nothing breaks like the heart of a child you say? You have always been good with words and writing, something I take after you. It was these words everyone loved you for, your friends, your lovers, your tenant and it was your actions that drove away your own family. But guess what? They are not here. I am here as I always have been. I do wish I was born as your friend because being your affair would be incest and gross! I wish I was born your friend and not your child, the daughter you didn’t want. I have would have been a true friend, father. We would be sharing together these very last few moments that could make you smile that jolly smile that was reserved only for a select few in your life. Even your tenant was luckier than me for having such good relations with you. I have always been jealous of that man. I wish I was him. The way your laugh echos in the walls of that property you purchased to rent to your tenant whose frustrations of debt I endure.

All that the walls of your house you share with your family has heard are my cries, silence of your betrayed wife and indifference of my brother who is apparently too disappointing to you to be called your son. How many times have those walls heard you calling us words? I wish I lived in that rented property of yours as your tenant so that I could also know peace.

It is always the walls other than our house that knows of happiness. The walls other than our house hear you call me “your daughter.” 

“I…” you continue unwillingly, like a tug of war between your heart and tongue that has not known words of humility.

“My frustrations, my insecurities…. What do you call that—”

“Misplaced notions of authority?” I speak wanting one last round of trauma to remember you by.

That is how rotten I have become. Peace has become troubling. If I am without conflict for a very long time, I find something misplaced. I have fought with you protecting my mother, my sibling and myself that words of love sound odd now.

“I can’t fight.” Never had I ever thought this is what I would hear coming out of your mouth that has spewed only words to instigate altercations.

“I should have…..” the silence was killing me.

“Gone to the therapist?” I added.

“Really?” He sounded shocked after all that he has done to me. I should be the one shocked with this change in your attitude.

“My heart aches…”

He continues and I zone out, remembering all the times my heart ached. My eyes roll to the back of my eyes. I can feel them hitting a nerve in the back of my head, staring into nothingness. That old friend I haven’t visited since I left his house at the age of nineteen. Have I not always wanted to hear what you are saying? Why is everything flashing before my eyes? All our memories and not one pleasant.

Our final memory from two years ago before I left your house, of your raised hand, wanting to punish me for my behaviour of being a free individual with rights and I holding them forcing them to hit me as all bounds of patience wore off. You trying to shake your hand away with the help of your other hand and I holding them tightly, bringing them closer to my face hoping you would place them with love on my cheeks and caress them. My adrenaline rush couldn’t be defeated so easily that day. I just wanted to hug you even in that moment. As I let out a loud scream, I had enough of this life. My face red and eyes popping and tears rolling out. I could no longer be what you wanted me to be. My life has been running and passing before my eyes with “Numb” by Linkin Park playing in the back ground. I was never born a son and I never can be. All I am is your daughter who has always loved you very much. I tried, dad, to be what you wanted me to be, studying what you wanted me to study, doing exactly as you told me. I wanted to be writer and you tossed all that I wrote in the trash. Still, I continued doing what you wanted me to do. No birthday present of mine to you were ever good enough. No achievements ever made you proud. You would congratulate all my classmates but not me. You would leave all my recitals mid-way. I would see you walk away mid-performance. Whenever I confronted you about it all, you say you are unhappy, tied down to us and didn’t want to pretend.

I never wanted you to be unhappy or be tied down to the family you chose. I wish there was a world, where I didn’t exist, my mother never had met you and you never had my sibling and you lived a fulfilled life with your friends, endless strings of lovers and your beloved tenant. I cannot help but wonder what beauty might your absence have held if this is the ruin your presence has brought? I am sure you think like wise. Us being together was a riot! We all hated it! At least we can agree on something. I wonder how many un-lived lives such as ours continue living in nothingness and chaos?

 How can a bond such as this still bring me here to you? To see you one last time, alive and breathing, just so that you can look at me with love for once. It is the end. You are leaving, finally and all I am left with is daddy issues, generational diseases and trauma that I should not procreate my own progeny with and your debts of that house that you rented out to your tenant who is more a child to you than I have ever been.

I hear your mouth open, wanting to say something more. You draw in a breath.

‘I have deepest regrets and love…” the pain in your voice is too genuine to be real.

This isn’t real, is it? It can’t be. You can never apologise! Because you don’t know what you did wrong even after the last altercation!

I hear your muffled cries….. Your cries sound like that of a woman……That woman crying is me!

I hear you saying something. And smack! Something hits my head. My eyes shoot open. I sat crouched on the floor. The bouquet I had bought on the ground. Standing up, I look into his eyes. Same cold, harsh gaze of his.

“Stop crying would you? It’s annoying!” He says angrily

“Yes, uh…sorry!”

“Why are you sitting on the floor? There is chair right here!” Was there ever, dad?

I stood frozen like I did, like I always have. The sun was about to set. The last glow of the dying skyline.

“You were saying something” I said.

“No!” He replies coldly “you have been sleeping on the floor crouched. I only awoke just now to your crying!” Was it all a dream then?

“No one came? Huh! I knew no one would! You all never cared about me!” Well, neither have your friends, lovers and your tenant who had all of you, the good part of you. I couldn’t say that as the heart monitor went haywire.

Nurses and the doctor rushed in. I stared blankly at him. Tears rolling down my face and I wondered whether you ever loved me?

I just want you to love me once. I love you. I hate you but I love you. Cries left my mouth. I was chocking on air. I walked to him, tripping and almost falling.

“Dad! I love you!”

“Everyone loves you when that line of the heart monitor is flat” he scoffs.

“Do you love me?” I ask meekly.

“It is this nature that has led you astray, to no where! So emotional. So pitiful” his voice getting airy and cracking. Numbers on the heart monitor were falling little by little.

Something tightened within my chest as the heat monitor began to lose its rhythm. Doctor giving it one last try. Was it all a dream? I cannot ask now. I don’t want him to think I was selfish.

It must have been a dream.

“If only you were a son!” A low, disappearing voice said with his cold eyes looking into mine losing the light in his pupils. The line now flat on the monitor and the sound hurting my heart more than my ears. That flat line cannot make me love you, for I have always loved you, but that cannot void the hate I have for you for not loving me. I worry about my own grave with the two feelings I will have to take with me, even though it is you whose final rites I would be performing.

It was a dream after all.

“I am sorry, dad!” but only if my fate had me born as your tenant, I could be the son you wanted and feel loved and at peace for that is not the fate of the child, the daughter you had but never wanted.