Six years after my father had gone away, my mother died peacefully in her sleep. An empty bottle of Codeine on the bedside table. Almost a decade of tears still drying on her cheeks.
After burying the woman I had come to loathe, Matthew was put in the system because I hadn’t been fit to care for him. With eyes wide soaked with pain, my brother had clung to me before the social workers had forced him away.
I watched him leave with a numbness that never really left. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t be angry or sad.
If I felt anything, it was relief.
I left that same day I said goodbye to Matthew and found a life somewhere else.
I became someone else.
I changed my last name to Whitaker, my mother’s maiden name. I had wanted no connection to the father I had loved so deeply and lost so totally.
But as time wore on my hatred, my rage, faded into something else.
I forever tiptoed the line between light and dark, never really knowing which way I’d go.
It was hard to plan a future when I didn’t really know who I was.
I struggled to breathe under the weight of a beast that had been given to me.
A gift I had never wanted but received all the same.
During the bad times I would remember what my life had been like before we found out who my father really was.
Ignorance had been the balm for my battered soul.
I liked to sit on the bench beneath the willow tree by the river that ran through the park. I could see the soccer pitch and the tennis courts. It was a great place to watch people. Invent the stories that consumed me.
Today I had brought my green notebook and decided to write.
I wrote for many different reasons. It was a therapy. It was a personal sacrifice. It was a means to an end.
But today I wanted to write just for me.
I started by describing the trees. It seemed like a harmless place to begin.
Thin and crisp,
Victim of fall’s destruction.
Red
Yellow
Brown
Falling
Falling
Down.
Beneath my feet
I walk on the ashes
Of nature’s afterthought.
The words poured out like acid onto the paper. Burning and fluid. They hurt. But I loved the pain.
It was simple so simple. It helped but it wasn’t enough. I needed more.
Different words for different stories…
Ones that hadn’t yet been written.
The sound of a child’s laughter got my attention. I looked up to see a young dad chasing his son around the swings before swooping him up in his big, safe arms and smothering him with kisses.
My pen hovered above the paper but nothing would come.
I watched the father with his son for a while, a soft smile on my face. Forgotten. Stagnant.
“I’m sorry, my baby, baby girl.”
The voice seemed to float out of the air, settling in the grass and trees.
The whispered words of a father’s guilt.
I tore the poem out of the notebook and crumpled it into a ball. Other memories…other stories filled my mind.
“Imagine that all the stars are people. What stories would they tell?” Daddy whispered, his voice drifting in the inky darkness.
Mom was inside with Matty. He had a stomachache and cried most of the evening, ruining my daddy’s welcome home dinner. I hated when he acted like a brat.
It made me want to smack him.
Daddy had been gone for almost two weeks. Two weeks was forever for a seven-year-old girl.
Too long.
Daddy and I lay outside on a blanket. It was our special time. When he would come home and tell me the stories of the stars.
Sometimes I asked him about his fishing trips and why I could never come and he’d shake his head, never explaining why.
But then he’d tell me his stories, and I would forget to be upset about him leaving all the time. About the fact that he was staying away longer and longer.