It took him a while to decipher the expression on my face when I stared at his frail and unsteady body.
He was pale, the only shade of color to his face were his eye sockets; sunken in and a brownish-red color. His pupils were fully dilated and the baby blue tone that once encompassed around them had faded to a dingy gray.
I had not known this man. He attributed to my creation but it was not the same man who held me in his arms in the living room recliner when we would watch Modern Marvels together, eating M&Ms and laughing about the awkward tone of the narrator’s voice.
I was disgusted with him now, ashamed, he could barely stand up. He was thirty five years old and had an aging face of a man who was pushing sixty. He gripped the dining room chair, white knuckling the only object that was holding his 120 lbs body up as his knees gave out every so often with a slight jerk.
The silence felt like centuries, I just stood there staring at him, waiting for his reaction to my presence. He diverted looking at me for the as long as he could and I just continued to stare, watching the man that once called me “Zanza-Boo” shake uncontrollably.
He finally raised his head returning my silent stare and asked one simple thing:
-“Why the fuck did you come back bitch?”
“You asked me to.”
My voice was steady and it took him by surprise. He just stared at me, slightly threatened by my calmness. I wasn’t sure if he knew that it was all an act. Inside I was still that timid little pathetic excuse for a human. The one that use to cower in the corner staring at the wall that had daunted a new facial impression embedded in its yellowed exterior. I was dedicated in not showing him that side of me once more.
I tried to never give him the joy of watching me cry. What I hated the most was the ecstatic happiness and sense of accomplishment it gave him from watching my face liquefy. It only took that one tear, that one fucking little tear, to make him feel like his day was complete. It felt like acid, as it burned my skin and I could feel every centimeter as it ventured down my cheek and hung on to the very edge of my chin and I quickly hurried to wipe it away, hoping he didn’t catch my, one of many, moments of weakness. Unfortunately it was always noticed, no matter how much I tried to shadow it by burying my face in my hands.
-“Leave,--
His face was adamant, like he was never so meaningful about anything in his life. My eyes began to glaze over and he slid out of focus. I kept excusing his behavior, constantly. I would always tell myself he didn’t mean it, that he was just saying things out of anger. When he was sober, he was better, everything was better.
--you should have never come back, get the hell out of my house! You were nothing but a fucking…….”
He continued to mutter incoherent words and every now and then I would catch a few of them. “You’re the reason” and “it was better”.
My lip curled in a manner that could only be characterized as a combination of a laugh and a sneer. I was filled with so much pity and hate for this one man that most of the time it was all I could do to restrain from my old antics and throw a blunt object at his skull hard enough to push the desire of the drug and drink out of his mind.
I was wearing eyeliner and it had smudged from me wiping my eyes to suppress the tears that were welling up inside me. He called me a whore with that make up; he said I reminded him of my mother.
“She porously made sure she got pregnant. Talk about a one night stand going wrong, just to keep me around. It ruined my life, fucking whore.”
I walked out of the room not saying anything. What was there to say? I had heard this before; there was no reason in arguing. He was like a broken recorded, for sixteen years I heard this man slander my name, curse my existence and wish for my death so badly that he attempted to drown me three times and push me off two roof tops.
As I walked away he tried chasing me, but collapsed. I turned around abruptly at the sudden change of volume and seen him lying on the floor shaking. So weak, so helpless, no one could have been threatened by this fetus-like embodiment. He reminded me of the time he had stood above me, watching me shrivel up in my own pitiful existence.
I remember one night, my sister was at her friends house down the street. I had called him father…..just……father, with no attitude, no hint of sarcasm. He charged for me and grabbed me by the back of the skull and smashed my head into the edge of the bar counter. I sat up from the stool and tried to walk to the kitchen sink but I collapsed, I was dizzy and everything began to spin and became surreal. It was like I wasn’t in my body. I grabbed my face, it hurt too much to open my eyes but I could feel a cool wetness drip down my arm when I released my grasp upon the bridge of my nose. I rolled over and fought the pain in my eyes and squinted towards the tan-colored tile, now dyed with a deep red coating. My hair was sticking to my face and as I pulled it away I seen my dad standing above me, panicked; only for the reason that my mom was to come back home any moment and my face was unidentifiable. He picked me up and sat me on the counter and submerged my head into the dirty dish water. I could hear through every recovery of air that if I had washed the dishes it wouldn’t have been dirty.
He told me to go take a shower and to cover my face when I get out. So I did, and when I came out my mom was in her bedroom sleeping. I went out into the living room and my dad was watching the television and told me to go wash the dishes. So I did, I went to bed that night and prayed. Prayed for him to change, to get better, and to find what he was looking for.
He never changed, he never got better, but I guess he found what he was looking for, but it damn sure wasn’t us.
