Memory of my Father

Dear dad, six years have galloped past leaving me in the dusts of time. Six years have seen to it that your memory is but a smoky tendril fading into the everblue and however much I try, I am unable to reconstruct the angled features of your handsome face those rare days you managed to smile. It’s all gone, dulled with un-remembering leaving me wishing for impossible things.

Then perhaps…perhaps…perhaps it doesn’t matter anymore.  What am I left to offer you but heartfelt wishes of a hurting child thrust into maturity without the teachings of time. Perhaps the gods can sympathise and grant this man-child only ten wishes and a boon for a stolen childhood that will never be found. Ever again.

Dear dad, how is the afterlife treating you? Do you get to go out the house in the evenings to smoke your Sportsman cigarettes under the moonlight? Is that even allowed? How do the beers those ends taste? Are they served warm or cold? Do you still fight for the respect you think you deserve even though you already have it safely tucked into your meticulously pressed man-clothes? Are you still the same man I grew up to know like the back of my hand: A nasty tyrant buoyed by the bottle and a thoughtful man in the cold sober mornings craving matooke and liver, hot enough to burn your tongue. Do you miss thrashing the five year old me or were you only punishing yourself? I never held it against you, because in you, I always saw the man I could be. Or not. And is the afterlife all it’s made up to be or is this another lie grownups tell the kids?

Dad, ten wishes and a boon, that is what I’ve asked. If those wishes were cashed in for time, I would go back and fix everything that set the course of your fifty years of strife to its unfortunate end. I owe you that much If not more. You’re my dad after all, even after all has been said and done.

I would go back in time and befriend the five year old you. I would teach you the lessons you tried to teach me in your own twisted way. I would teach you to be brave and honourable and hard as the will of a woman scorned. I would teach you that men are men and have to do what it takes to protect their own. Men don’t fight women, and that should be the first law, never to be broken at whatever cost. Men are born to be free and have to be left to their own devices. Men don’t get lost and should never have to ask for directions. They will always find a way back to those they love and those who love them. I would teach you that pain is temporary, pain is a mosquito bite to be swatted away. Blood is like sweat that needs to be wiped away. What matters is that we are free to be the people we were meant to be deep inside. Excesses of cigarettes and booze are not a man’s way.  A man needs a clear mind to plot for the next day’s forage. I would teach you things, dad, things you never taught me.

Perhaps I would give you a fighting chance. Perhaps you wouldn’t have to die at 50, looking 35 but still wasting away. The last day I saw you, thoughtful and soft-spoken, that last day would last until I am man enough to be proud to be called your son. I wouldn’t have to see people who used to know you as a child but never thought to help set you on the right path. I wouldn’t have to see people who despised you come to put you into the ground. That should have been my job. A son’s last act of respect for his parent is to bury him with his own hands. That failing, I have chosen to bury you deep into the soil of my mind and build you a grave of flowery words and nostalgic half-smiles, those you used to give that keep lingering in my memory of you.

I am your son, dad. This much is true.

Six years left to rot like road-kill, I am finally burying you.

Folie à deux | The Silence of Strangers

My industrious fingernails tore their way into the soggy earth in the shadow of the gnarled avocado tree a dozen paces from where I lived. It took me the better part of the chilly night, surrounded by a cricket symphony and a baritone scale of overzealous bullfrogs but I managed to do it before the break of dawn. I dismantled the seven foot podium erected in her honour five seasons now and piece by piece, I buried it so deep down, it’s now a footnote in the echelons of my love history. I picked up the alabaster bust made to her specifications with shaky hands. It was the only piece of idolatry I allowed myself because I knew it channelled her essence into my nether regions and had thawed my frozen heart so wonderfully these past years of unbearable solitude.

I buried it.

I unskinned layers upon layers of layers of intimacy like discarded Matryoshka dolls and bared our relationship to the grinning gleaming skeleton it had become. Not that there was anything of amusement for me. Without meat to support my obsession, I saw her for what she truly was and what I saw sucked my purple gums into my jawbone. Perhaps had I chanced upon this discovery sooner, I wouldn’t have made such a braying ass of myself for such an extended period of time. Such a laugh she must have had at my expense.

 Such a clown I’ve been.

I uprooted the avocado tree from its roots and had it serve in place of the grave stone. With bleeding fingernails, I scratched our names into the crusty unyielding bark as a parting gift. I drew a broken heart around our names because I finally believed what everybody already knew with startling certainty: star crossed lovers we were even though I had been too blind to see. I was too full of myself boasting how I had an eye for the beautiful late bloomers, a nose for hopeless romantics and an ear for musical heartbeats. She sang me a sad tune that built a stone bridge to my heartstrings. Her refrains were subtle tentacles I explained away as female reluctance to reveal it all. Her hooks were bastards. Only now does memory serve me in its glaring clarity. Her hooks left me bleeding left and right but I mistook the blood for tears of happiness.

No wonder she left me winded.

Now joined with the unforgiving earth I don’t even bother to say a prayer for her. She took the god of our love and raped him in front of my eyes. She took the sanctity of our whispered promises and built armies to fend off my advances. She took me out of my skin and strung me out to dry, desiccated like the month of July.

No, I do not say a prayer for her because she has all the gods she needs within her. Let her pray to herself for all I care.

I am done!

Death Note

Dear Diary,
When you read this, know that that its already too late and I am dead already so do not shed your Ink; do not think I did not love you, for surely I did, as much as I was allowed to; but everything has a beginning and an end, and I suppose this is the end for me and the beginning of a different journey for you, one without me. I neglected you so.
I am accustomed to dying already, done it so many times already, but man! Every time it gets harder and harder to bear the pain- of dying inside. Death is such a dark lonely place. It’s so cold, so threatening to be all alone, to die alone and not have at least one soul to tell your story. But I am dead already, so it doesn’t matter much.
I thought I would continue caring for the comforts I cared for before. Sadly, I don’t. Dying is no different from living a half-life. For death is a half-life as it is. I go through the motions of death (Call it Life if you may) with a faraway look. The days are a blur. The food is bland, water…well that at least still tastes the same- like nothing! My legs trudge on, the lungs breathe on, my eyes look on as I live or as I die. For each moment I breathe, I die once more.
At least you didn’t leave Dearest Diary- though I suspect you would have done the same had you little windy legs and flailing arms to carry you far away from me. I know you too would have chosen to make a run for it. I do not blame you. I am a marked man and as is the way with marked men, they lose everything they hold dear to them. What is one more heartbreak? What is one more loss? What is one less Diary to keep at my chest for comfort? You do not want me anymore. I neglected you so.
Dear diary, mark my words; I will be less of a burden to you. My death marks the day I will release you from my bondage. I will rid myself of any renegade feelings I felt for you. Live a happier life than I could give you. I have to go now. Keep my secrets and I will scratch you back…