Blacklight on white walls.

He never visited me once. Eight years. How was I supposed to know he wasn’t even alive?

The smell of the house was different. I had missed the funeral by three years. My father spent them in the ground, while I was getting pummeled to carpeted floors.

I got to visit the grave the night I got back. It wasn’t even that dark, and the grave seemed to glisten in the pale sunset. I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t live in that house, or go back to that school.

Walking into that living room was a constant reminder that I was the stranger. I was the one that had left and not my father. But it never felt like that. He was the one that abandoned me in that shit hole. He was the one who decided that it was my time to go. Then he goes off and dies. The absolute nerve.

Funnily enough, my room was the same. I thought he would’ve sold everything. Even my bed hadn’t had a changed ruffle in the sheets. It made me think back to the last time I saw it. What a shameful night. I cried so much, and for what? In the end, I still did what he wanted me to. Because I was a child, and he was my father.

I still remember the disgust on his face when I told him I wanted to stay.

“You can’t. You’re gonna be a man soon, and I can’t raise you.”

It was almost as if he knew of his fate.

***

Walls are made up of coughs and phone checks. Of soft nods and the picking of nails and the ticking of a clock that doesn’t exist.

When I watch those low budget renovation shows, they always talk about how white makes rooms feel bigger. And when I stare behind the TV, at my plain white wall, all I can be reminded of are the words on a page. 

A slow waving of the stillness at the window sills. The swinging back and forth to the walls of pale misery. Words so numbing, they dwindle and spike at the wrong moments. And when you get them right, the moment seems to transpire. Short cuts of phrases repeated over and over and over. They all meddle into the fabric of the couch I sit on every night and I try to drain them away with the beer grappled in my left hand.

I switch to a documentary about psychology, and how imperative real human relationships are to the psyche. Then look at the empty apartment around me, where a vacuum of breath is crunched into every corner with the ever-growing mold of beer cans, and unfolded laundry. My roommate left a couple hours ago. It’s always a routine for him, and he never seems to get bored.

"You off out?" I had asked him earlier.

"Yeah," he replied as he pulled the door closed, not even bothering to shoot a glance back.

Speaking of, he’ll be home soon. I’ll walk you through how it always plays out. Between 23:30 - 00:30, he will unlock the front door with his keys, as his arms are around a girl that has her back on it. They will then stagger inside, and he’ll ask her if she wants something to drink. Depending on how far gone she is, he will either bring her a glass of more alcohol, or just cut it short and walk her to his room.

As a result, I will spend the next 16 minutes (approximately, he might last 18 minutes on a good night) knocking his bed head into the wall behind me. And I will pretend I cannot hear the grinding of my brain stem against my spine and the bleeding of my nails from scratching my throat because screaming would give away that there's an empty carcass living inside me.

Then, silence.

And honestly, the silence is much worse.

It makes me think of my father, as he lies sleeping in his grave. Of his eyes still looking for my shortcomings.

He’s underground, remember. He’s not here. He can’t hurt you anymore.

But he can.

He hurts me when I move my arms and I think of his bulky hands. Of his ragged hair and misshapen nose. When I look in the mirror, I do not see me. I never have. Even in death he reaches up to my neck and squeezes it all back out.

I still wonder what my mother must’ve been like. Did she ever love him? Or was it strictly lust.

I hope she loved him. I hope she saw how caring and forgiving he was.

He loved me.

He really did...

I think he did?

Didn't he? 

I don’t think he’s loved a darn thing in his life. And he’s gone now. What does it matter?

It’ll always matter.

I need my mother. I need her to tell me why she left and why I never even knew her name. I need to know what half of me is hers and why my father had never loved me. If I knew that, then surely I'd be happy.

“Dad! Where’s my mummy? Like the one Joseph has. I want one.”

“She left us. We weren’t good enough for ‘er. Stupid whore. Always baggin' after the white guys.”

“Why did she go?”

“Shut up and get cleanin’.”

And I'll sit here, for days on end sometimes, drowning myself trying to find the answers to questions I never really let myself ask.

I was the reason my mother left, I know it, but he never admitted it.

In a year or two, I'll probably spot her golden hair, like mine. Maybe she’ll be my receptionist or store clerk. Maybe I’ll watch her at the park and walk behind her. Hoping she’ll recognise herself in me.

She’ll whisper how she’s always loved me and how she hated herself for leaving.

She’ll introduce me to my two sisters and my brother. And to my grandfather.

He’s about to go, she’ll say as she walks me out of the hospital room.

It’ll be hereditary too. I’ll feel it slowly rising up my chest day by day, and refuse to accept the fact that I might kick the bucket in my twenties. I’ll hug everyone goodbye and grasp my mother’s hand as it gets harder and harder to find air. She’ll kiss my cheek while we celebrate upon the newfound connection, devoid of the hell that was my father.

I’m sure that I was alright only a few years ago? But then, something shifted. I don’t know how, or when. Who, What, Where, or Why. Just that one day I woke up to the feeling of eyes being poked into my shoulder blades. Or the look of utter distaste in the mirror. The crunching of rotting leaves under my runners as I hiked to the top of a hill.

It’ll be slow, like most things. 

A slow wave settling into the lap of the sand as the sun kisses your skin goodnight. As slow as an autumn leaf hurtling casually towards the ground. The slow calming of a storm after years of beating and bruising. A surge of waves that battered your skin, until purple spots bloomed. The final blinks before you go to sleep.

And I’ll close my eyes, and think about how useless it all was.