Growing Pains

My dad likes talking about dying a lot. What to do when he's struck with rigor mortis. When the failed flesh topples over the hulking beast of the body he lumbers about. When he's commemorated in whatever fashion we see fit, not really what he wanted, going out like this, but how we settled it. Of course, he never says anything so flowery, trying to avoid actually talking about dying. For him, dying is a part of the work schedule, clock out and we won't see you till you're six feet under.

"So understand that if I'm dead, you are under no conditions, allowed to smoke weed in my car."

Dad reminded me while we were moving from our old house. For his job as we were told, but we lived fairly meager and no regular showers. We ate at some food fast place while he talked more about the moral implications of smoking in his favorite car. It always empty in those walk in fast food places. Thankfully, everybody gets drive through, and we were at a pitstop city where nobody lives, but somehow has people who can work a part time job for college. Besides that, I do believe it concerns Dad a great deal what to do if he should die. What city to live in, what college to go, where his friends are, not to pester his wife for money. There is no money as he tells me, all dried up in the desert. Slacked the thirst of some poor wanderer. The only kind of money he has is the debt kind. Debt on numerous, cheap, flimsy credit cards. No debit cards though.

So it's just him and I, going to a new city for a new job to sate his needs once more, this time for sure. Keeping me in the backseat because the passenger seat holds boxes more efficiently. I'll just read those books either way, from some public library with the pages pressed so they stick out. A stylistic choice I'm sure, but it makes your fingers feel grained and tired from flipping pages. Exhausted from holding on to the rough, dry papyrus paper. We don't return those books, so I tear off the plastic and the stickers, give them a home in a shelf made from old crates from a job I held for a bit. We go the whole ride just him and I, and our collection of unnailed items. His wife already living in his new house.

I say his wife because that's what he calls her. I don't know what he called my Mom, but now he calls her **** now. I wasn't a exactly planned part of the puzzle. A new, frustrating piece that comes out of the mountainous piles. Edges not fitting anything you've built or those four cheat corner pieces. Guess you gotta look at the picture on the box, and try to start a new arrangement from there, we'll connect both thresholds eventually. But my Dad seemed to have accepted his puzzle is over, despite those plagued patches in it. He was an artist in college, but he left his tools and canvas there, and I don't suppose we can ask for them back now. My Mom should be back with them any second though, just a little over 18 and a half years late. 

Those melancholy daydreams kept me drifting till we pulled out in front our new life. When we arrived at the house, and got the last box unpacked, I was 22. Four years spent trying to find space on my shelf for some stolen words from some very old fellows. When it was neatly arranged, I had finished my shift at our local college, and I was off to live on my own. Dad never died but his flesh bubbled into fat and frowns. He lost that go getting attitude which got him here, the world had flayed him till he was a wraith, working for some company till he can clock out. I felt sorry for him, but I was ready for this so I guess it didn't matter, I didn't ask for any handouts on my way out, and he wasn't gonna give them. Sitting in the lap of a woman who could hardly speak english, face of a battered animal. Timid but stitched for survival. I wished her best of luck, and to my Dad the best of health. At the time, I truly wished those both.

The cold, tepid wind of a city formed in the bile of its own atmosphere. Concrete buildings stopping those soft, gripping winds of the earth. Instead the exhaust fumes and intrepid sighs formed its afternoon breezes. I was free to do whatever I pleased in my life, as if slithering out of the chains of living under someone else had finally eased the morality of committing those adult sins in public. I had no plans or aspirations. I was not ready to carve out my piece of the earth yet. I had given nothing to it, only making that space on a loan. I never spent more than 10 years on my life working towards any one thing, and I was not ready to do something like that. So instead, I decided to pursue the age old hobby of wandering.

Wandering looking for my Mother. The caretaker who must be finishing her piece, a puzzle cracked enough to show the plywood table underneath. That's what I did, I suppose. Wander from city from city, asking if you've seen someone like me, but older and with a much more tired face. And that's the strangest thing, someone did know her. One of my Dad's friends, knew where she lived. Not that they knew each other personally, but they had each other added on Facebook. What a strange time to be alive. He told me that he would arrange our meeting for us, that he would tell her about my situation, but that he wanted our meeting to be all the more cinematic. Just like from those movies, where the long lost orphan finds his parents on an odyssey. 

Expect it wasn't like that when we met. She came in with no tears of joy, and a face of anguish. Finally finding her way back home, but instead she came in bitter. Bitter not to me, but the pretense of me. Another regretful memory of college, born because she lived in Christian Minnesota, it was hers to birth, if not to give to a noble cause later. That's what she saw when looked at me. A notification on your credit card that a reluctant present had been returned by a family member. I had expected her to come at with me will a billion questions. How was I, what was I, where had I been, why I had come back. But instead she looked at me with closed little eyes, waiting for me to say something. So I said what I had given so much thought, so much agonizing change to form myself around it.

"How come you weren't there with me?"

And she told me. Told me plainly, with no pity, no remorse, no pained torture from the Jack of Fates. She told me that she couldn't do it. She had a job to do, and I couldn't be a part of it. I would be better off without her, it was the most rational decision. It was of course a very hard decision that she gaves hours of thought, lost sleep over it I'm sure. But she decided she should do what was best for me, and that was for me to never know her. Never know that I had a mother who couldn't be there for me, but rather leave that question aloof, let a bitter man give his tired answers on it. 

I stared at her for so long, she was not the sweet actress I had wished for. There was no love in our meeting, we were two strangers who should have known each other. That was it, two casteless souls, who devoured the chains connecting them, and that was that. It's over now, can't go back and make her sit with me on those birthdays. On those nights sleeping in a car, in those nights of malformed discontent. I picked up my cheap coffee, in a cup that go take on the go, fits in your cup holder, after a little bit of work and grease. As the dainty bell rang out from that family owned coffee shop, I looked around. I had no one expecting anything of me, nothing to do for any reason other than I should find it my half hearted whim. It was raw, blunt independence forced on me with no wish of it from me. I suppose I am to work some faceless job, with only my day dreams to keep me company. What a little, quaint square my life had been constructed in.