For Whom the Light in the Bulb Flickers

      The bulb hanging over my head filling me with the long-lost need to write doesn’t give me light to see by as I make my way down the path set before me; no, this one is a black light that points out every flaw and chink in the armor I hide behind. This one makes visible to the world the monstrosity that looks back at me every time I have the misfortune of passing a mirror.

           For the first time in a long while, I sit in front of the keyboard sheltered under a layer of dust, the letters faded from the abuse I dole out to it as the cruel worlds born in the recesses of my mind demand to be unleashed unto our world via the sacrificed trees and the ink that decorates their flesh with my words.

           Even on a good day I feel nothing, not a damn thing, unless I am sitting in this very spot. The harsh glow of the laptop screen, the old lamp that gives off more heat than light, the worn chair creaking with every move I make, and the desk whose varnish has dulled where my elbows habitually rest while I puzzle through my plot twists and character developments. The post I purposefully abandoned so many months ago for fear that I was not strong enough to bear the weight of what I could already feel brimming over the dam of my hardened heart, just waiting for the chance to burst forth from my fingertips as they danced across the keys and give life to the thoughts that don’t dare to venture past my lips.

           When I sink into the worn chair, my eyes briefly close of their own volition as I am battered by the very part of me that I’ve diligently kept locked away all this time. Every vicious gash in my heart, every tear that I had to hold back so the salt wouldn’t add to my already burning wounds, every ache radiating from deep within my chest breaks free as the words spill forth and refuse to be censored or reined in as they stampede towards the solace of being acknowledged on the page before me, filling its vast, empty plains with every iota of the emotions I denied for so long. They threaten to drown me in their wake as wave after wave relentlessly barrels into me, leaving me only barely able to channel and direct them where they need to go, yet they remain raw and wild, untamed and unrelenting, damning and unforgiving. Their sharpness cuts me open and the rivers run red with my blood, flowing just as freely as the tears seeking to purify my irredeemably defiled soul.

           Two paragraphs to get the way he smelled just right, the way that the scents of coal dust and diesel fuel always lingered underneath the top layer of Allspice, no matter how many times he showered. Another on how his dark brown hair adopted a reddish hue when the sun hit with the last rays of the evening and how his rich brown eyes became almost yellow as he turned his gaze to embrace them when his boisterous laugh filled the spaces between the mountains as its echo bounced against their hard surfaces and reverberated back to him.

           After a re-read of his description gets my approval, I dive in head-first into the deep end of the cesspool rocking about in my thoughts, the end that threatens to swallow me whole and never let me go. Resting my steepled fingers against my puckered lips, I stare down at the section detailing the day we received the dire diagnosis that turned our world upside down.

I am four years old again: wrapped around Daddy’s leg as he walks through the house, giggling as I clutch his arm and he lifts me higher, clinging to him as we ride Papaw’s ATV, fighting to stay awake long enough for Daddy to come home from work. I am fifteen as he teaches me how to drive, watching science fiction movies with him all weekend long, looking for him in the stands during my band competitions. I am eighteen as he misses my Senior Night because of work, when he finds out I was accepted to the University of Reno, when he is diagnosed with cancer, when I no longer know if he will be alive to see me graduate high school. Daddy has cancer? Then I might as well be two years old. Does. Not. Compute.

Each letter I type painfully purges the infection festering from the wound left open to the nonexistent mercy of the elements throughout the five years of watching him transition from the bottomless well of strength to the shriveled, mindless mound of flesh he was reduced to on the morning his unseeing eyes absorbed the rays of his last sunrise. I force myself to inhale a shaky breath before pushing myself further into my second freefall through hell.

           I take twenty pages just to describe how the cancer stole his mind, losing my own as the storm raging within me grows more violent with each passing word. I outline in morbid detail the nightmares running rampant in my head when I close my eyes at night of watching him wither away to nothing more than a shriveled husk of the man who had once been the invincible protector keeping the demons with their outstretched claws at bay, fighting back the shadows and what waited beneath them so that I might know peace in my dreams.

           My fingers unleash torrents of the angry accusations demanding to know why he hadn’t gone to the doctor sooner, the frustrating helplessness of watching my mother fall apart as she lay with her ear pressed against his chest in desperation as she waited with bated breath for each beat she was afraid wouldn’t come, the abandonment of screaming to the heavens “Why him? Why us? What did we do so wrong as to warrant such a wrathful punishment?” only to receive the dead silence I had bitterly anticipated, and the gutting guilt burdening the peace of the “after” and the torment finally being over. They crash and beat against my form where I stand resolute in the decision to sever the strings rendering me the marionette manipulated by the blackened ocean carrying me out to sea and leaving me adrift until I succumb to the siren’s song of the solace offered from deep within its cold depths.

           The thunderous roar of the maelstrom crescendos until it reaches its peak and bathes me in a deafening silence as I finally arrive at the inevitable conclusion of his death. I describe it all in heart wrenching detail, matching the brutality of the wind whipping against my face as they carried his lifeless body away in the looming winter storm brewing at the edges of our grief.

           It was mid fall, judging by the multicolored leaves barely hanging on to their branches of the trees I could see. I was standing in a quaint little home that smelled of cornbread and the unmistakable odor that always managed to cling to anything from or of a hospital. The morning sun streamed through a smudged window and danced with the cigarette smoke curling around its rays. The tendrils were thickest where they emerged from the burning tobacco in the shaking hand of a woman nearly forty-four years of age. All was silent save for the ungodly noise much like that of the water in the bottom of a bathtub gurgling as it struggled to find a passable route past a massive clog in the drain. It found a rhythm between the small amounts of water making its escape and the silence as the space above the clog filled once more while waiting for the passage to clear for the next round to flee. Gurgle. Silence. Gurgle. Silence. Such an innocent, seemingly every day sound – yet it was vulgarized when I remembered that it came from the inert figure on the hospital bed stationed in the corner of the deceptively comfortable living room.

           The layer of stone shielding me these past five years crumbles and leaves me ruthlessly exposed to the onslaught, bursting right along with the dam holding my words hostage from their rightful place on the pages in front of me. The once pure white of their mocking blankness is now riddled with the blackness that, until I dusted off they keys begging me to use them to sing the tune of the story within me aching from the need to be told, encased me in it numbing cocoon so thickly that I couldn’t see the light reaching its warm hand out to me.

           I take a second to appreciate the pages upon pages born from the chaos that is me in my true nature, unfiltered and unrestricted. Filling my lungs with the first relieved breath I’ve taken in over five years, the realization that I am free of both the weight in my heart and the block in my writing brings a smile that stretches the under-used muscles in my mouth and I feel it reach my eyes, reigniting the doused ember nestled there.

           Loudly cracking my knuckles, I settle deeper into my chair as I prepare to launch myself into the new world taking shape in my mind, the ideas slamming into me faster than I can type. The residue lingering in my mind isn’t pity for what we went through, but the thought that tragedy renders the broken pieces it leaves behind as fertile breeding grounds for creativity.