Moving on

"Move, move!" screamed Henry at the top of his lungs, inside the supermarket. With age, he had become bored of people, thinking that everyone looked alike and had no personality. He had not always been rude, but loneliness had condemned him to become the worst version of himself. At sixty-three he was not very old, but loss had drained his motivation to live, he barely survived. Existence for Henry was made of frozen ready-meals, loads of boiled cabbage stench that soaked his clothes, and dust, that he didn’t care to wipe away. His apartment was the precise mirror of his personal image, shabby and dirty. Henry believed that everything needed care to bloom, but since he lacked it, he had stopped to care about himself as well.

He moved close to the frozen area of the supermarket, complaining with a rattling voice: "Young lady please move aside, I can't reach the peas if you stand there". The girl turned around, fixing Henry in the eyes with a bare expression. The two remained still, frozen in their positions, incredulous. They had not seen each other in eight years. In Henry’s eyes, Angela looked just like her mother, but what he couldn't know, was that she had not inherited her kind personality. The two women had the same pointy nose and the same proud expression, but Angela became stiff with pride whenever her believes were challenged, she could not come down to compromises, and was not welcoming towards other people's mistakes.

Henry smiled, his daughter's face made he remember the happy time when they were still a family, and Alina was still with them. Angela moved aside, breaking the eye contact in an attempt to escape from him. She wasn't ready to face the guilt that had risen in her chest as soon as she saw him. Henry was nothing like the man she knew. His skin had become wrinkly and dark, he had lost so much weight one would have not been able to recognize him for the happy man he had been, always giggling his round belly pretending to be Santa Clause. Angela had run away on her seventeenth birthday, leaving behind a note on the kitchen table that read: “I have to find myself. This house has become linked to too many sad memories. I will be back.” Henry had no clue where she went, and she did not come back.  Running away when challenges presented themselves was another characteristic of hers, she was not able to confront her fears, always preferring to run from them as far as she could.

“Angela, you are here, you have come back!” murmured Henry under his breath, before she could avoid him. He could not know that she had never truly gone very far from the town. Once she escaped, she refuged herself inside an abandoned hut, surviving on the food she was able to find in garbage cans. She had not considered how hard it was to live a respectable life, but she did not care to be respectable. Even if begging was all she could do for the first three years since she escaped, it was harder for her to come back home. The street had contributed to harden her character, since the only person she had around at the time was herself. She understood how important it was to take care of her persona, since she had not allowed anyone else to do it .

“For what I can see, I am just doing my shopping,” she coldly answered. Her pride didn’t allow her to tell him she was sorry for abandoning him when he was the most fragile. She had been fragile as well, but not anymore.

”I would love to invite you home, just for a tea, to catch up. I would like to know where you have been all this time. You owe me an explanation!” Henry pretended to be ready to forgive all the lonely days he had spent waiting for her return, if she could acknowledge she had acted wrongly. The ability to forgive was not something of his character. He could not soften up his sharp edges even or a daughter. He had forgot what human contact truly was, making him unable to react to it.

“I don’t owe you anything, and I am not here just to plead for your forgiveness, going back to your place to stare at a wall, drink some tea and talk about how I succeeded in becoming someone without your help. I can’t call it home after eight years,” Angela snatched.

“This is what you think. You blame it all on me don’t you?” Henry asked with incredulity in his voice. She resembled him more than he wanted to admit.

“Henry, I do not need this anymore. The fights, the screams. I am over all this. You have never liked me the way I was. Me not being your child anymore, is what you can’t accept. I carved my way in this world, have a deeply satisfying life, the work of my dreams and I own an apartment,” she lied.

“I am not your father anymore to you. I am just Henry to you. I hope your satisfying job will fill your emotional need of getting a father back,” he barked at her, with evident hurt in his voice. "You are just a selfish little girl that won't be grateful for anything. You believe you have made it alone, you are even better off alone from me, but you are nothing without a real family, We are a family if you want it or not, and we should act like one!" he screamed straight at her face, in the middle of the shop. People started staring at them, as Angela looked straight into his eyes, allowing Henry to see a glimpse of compassion in her expression, a reproachful fold in her eyebrows that sadly said: "This is what I meant."

Before the screams, she considered if giving him a chance was worth the try, thinking that maybe he could have changed. She remembered the fun they had together when she was a child. However, back then, they were still “the three musketeers”. Since her mother’s death, Henry had remained irreversibly stuck in time, without realizing it. He could not see Angela for the woman she had become. She was still a wounded child in his eyes. The screams had brought back all of the memories of a childhood that carried the weight of a loss that could not be healed. Her father was still the one that had remained too concentrated on what he had lost to realize all he still had.

“In all these years, I have been able to discover that I am enough for myself. I can exist without others, happy with who I am and where I stand. It has been hard, but I have moved on. I won’t look back to all the pain I have been through.” The warm feelings in her eyes had disappeared, giving room to a barrier she was not willing to break. Her mother’s loss was something they both had trouble accepting, and now they both knew, they had not been able to face it as a family, but on her own, Angela had moved on. Time had trapped them in their own bubble, preventing them from reaching each other again.

Angela turned around, facing the vegetables on the shelf, unable to confront Henry: "I wish you all the best, maybe we will meet again. Goodbye." she was on the brink of tears. The meeting with her father had brought back all the feelings she had tried to avoid for so long, and was not ready to confront again. Ashe were all that was left of their relationship, just memories that were fading away. Henry remained in the vegetable isle, profoundly hurt by the meeting. Angela had moved on from a past she associated with him, getting away from Alina’s death, and from her bad memories. She still believed Alina was all he missed, but he missed Angela's company more than ever. Even if she was alive, it was the second time he had to mourn her loss.