ma & pa

EDIT: after writing this, i feel better, but it’s a bit heavy. just a warning.

4:55 AM. can’t never sleep anymore. so i smolder deep into the mattress. won’t ever know why my mother and everyone who knew the two claims my father was the only man she’d ever loved. won’t ever know why i’ve loved the people i’ve loved.

lately i just wish i understood. how, why, what. nothing makes sense, and i’m scared. nineteen is a big number in my family. college, driving, careers.. this family.. they just don’t get that. my mother, she was carrying my older half-sister at 15. my father, he got himself done in during his early 20s. 

we live fast and we live dumb.

i’ve only got one memory of my father, and i don’t remember his face, just the sunlight, a pair of hands strapping me into a carseat. what i remember clear as day is the detective talking to my mom. the police department, the playground nearby. 

i remember the face of the officer who handed me a sheriff badge sticker—i could pick that man out of a crowd today— but i can never recall the face of the john doe that mom had to identify. 

and it’s strange because, well, i knew him. i knew my father. it’s as if once he’d passed my small mind erased him entirely. i spent time making up faces in my mind to recall what he looked like and i only knew years later when i’d gotten a photo of him. didn’t look like the puzzle i pieced together in my mind.

i was raised by my mom and grandmother. they wanted me to believe he was an honorable, decent man, and it worked for a long time. 

a memory, earlier to the prior ones, my mother held a bandaged hand limp. it always stood out to me as a child, but i never said anything. i just saw mom, beautiful as the night is long— mom,— who loved me even though i was a raging, awful-mannered child after an incident unrelated to everything aforementioned.

i found out in my teens that bandage, that scar she carries today, was my father. that he died with all sorts of drugs in his system, that they never found his gun, that he was a bad man, that we had the same eyes.

he was born on valentine’s day, and died from a punctured heart rather than a shot, according to the autopsy. ironic, maybe karmic. 

i hate dissecting my behavior to determine if a bad behavior is ptsd or something ‘off’ i inherited from dad, both options suck. i also hate that i feel like i can only know him now by spending time with the darker parts of my psyche. sometimes i hate that i feel like i miss him, i miss the memories i somehow dropped off somewhere.

i feel like he would have answers for me. even if he was living wrong, even if he was conniving, i hear he always had apology roses for my mom. 

  am i like him?

          —ouroboros.