Axis

august 6th

dedicated to the person who leaves the best comment by the end of the week

 WHEN I WAS TEN, I contemplated killing myself.

I never had the guts to follow through, but the thought was a molecule passing in and out of the membrane of my mind, sometimes present, sometimes not.

It was after my mom died that I really started thinking about it in a serious light. Who it would affect (nobody except my dad, sort of, but in more positive ways than negative), what it would be like (I pictured an eternal sheathe of black), how I would do it (guns were too scary, knives too gruesome). I felt dead, my insides shriveled and sunken, which led me to figure that I might as well let the rest of me reach an equilibrium with that feeling of deadness. I didn’t see any other viable solution.

I was a ghost drifting through the streets, unnoticed and unimportant. Back then, Aunt Colleen was a name I saw on Christmas cards each year and a face amongst a sea of many that I saw at my mom’s funeral. The thought of living with her wasn’t feasible.

I was just a waste of space and money; a roadblock that got in the way. I lost my friends, I lost my mom, and I lost my youthful innocence. Every part of me was wilting away, right before my eyes, and all I could do was sit back and watch with a blank expression. I couldn’t even stand up without leaving dead flower petals in my wake.

My dad was oblivious to it all. He was so caught up in his business—if you could even call it that—that for the most part, he just sort of assumed things were all right. He had no parenting expertise; he had no idea what he was getting himself into when he finally caved to my mom’s pleas.

He didn’t feel like home at all, and half the time he felt more like a stranger taking me in under foster care than a father, but I guess in the grand scheme of things, he did what he could. There was always a supply of my favorite snacks sitting around the kitchen, he got me to and from school, and he occasionally gave me money to go shopping, which I never spent. The problem with him was that we had nothing in common, save for the fact that half of my genes are carbon copies of his, and the only trivial things about him other than his name and address that I knew for sure was that he was a big Steelers fan and that if people asked me what my dad did for a living, I was to tell them that he worked in accounting.

My dad never even went to college; that last one was a lie.

How, you may ask, did he scrounge up the income to not only sustain himself, but also his ten-year-old kid?

One word.

Drugs.

From the very beginning, even back when my mom was still alive and in the hospital, I knew something was off about my dad. Everything about him was so secretive, and he was always so vague about where exactly he was going and what he was doing. It didn’t take a genius to realize he was hiding something.

I had a lot of suspicions, but I wasn’t exposed enough to the real world to suspect drug dealing. It wasn’t until one of his customers, shaking with withdrawal and very desperate for his next dosage of cocaine, came knocking at the door while I was watching TV one night demanding for more that I finally realized what was going on.

Later that night, my dad pinned me up against the wall and told me that if I wanted to stay out of foster care, I would keep my mouth shut about my accidental discovery.

I hated living with my dad, but I knew enough about foster care systems to know that I had the better end of the stick. I promised to keep my mouth shut, though I started finding any excuse I could to get out of the apartment. Every spare ounce of free time I could get was spent at the hospital, even though the atmosphere was depressing and things were looking more and more bleak for my mom each day. Somehow, despite the circumstances, I managed to put on a big smile and welcome her with all the enthusiasm of a perfectly happy kid.