everchanging

1

Our house rose above the beach, overlooking the blue, blue ocean. We lived in a beach town, where surfers and swimmers and beach girls and hippies in vans came through every day, spreading out all along the beach. Mom and Dad were hippies, too. They had no real jobs and weren't tied down to the earth with office work or debt or babies who whined. They had no desire to take part in any of that, anyways. They lived freely, their lives depending on the wind and wherever it would take them, me included.

 The Artist and the Writist. That's what I called them. The perfect pair. My parents.

-

The ocean turned the mornings and nights into winter. I woke up with only one sock on, my feet two ice blocks. I loved mornings. The sun starting to glow through the blinds, the light noise of the ocean waves lapping at the shore, blinking sleep from crusty eyes. The smell of cigarette smoke drifted into the room, grazing along the ceiling. I stayed in bed, covers wrapped tightly around me until I couldn't stand the smell of the smoke anymore. I opened windows as Dad chain-smoked at the living room table, typing away. The door to Mom's bedroom was closed, her asleep behind it. If you listened hard enough, you could hear the light snores.

"Hi, Bug," Dad said, not looking away from the glowing screen. But I quickly got a look of his face and saw the deep purple circles that surrounded his sunken eyes. I knew he stayed up all night. If he got a story idea going, he wouldn't stop writing until all of the words had been drained out of him.

"Good morning," I said, peeling the last brown banana. I would have to go to the corner store later and load up on microwave dinners and fruits. A combo I had been buying for a few months now. I was the only one who had a desire to eat meals, my parents were too busy inside their heads. "What are you writing?" 

I was always curious, but I knew he wouldn't tell me. His words were a carefully guarded secret. He had the belief that if he shared anything important to him, it would immediately go wrong.  

"A ghost story," he said. I almost laughed. What a liar. A bad one, too. My father didn't waste his time poring over subjects that he considered unintelligent. Once he saw me reading a fantasy novel about wizards and witches and almost had a heart attack on the spot.

 "Wait," he suddenly said, putting the end of a pen in his mouth, deep in thought. "The story I'm writing is a perfect story." He hit the backspace a few times, thinking. A line appeared between his eyebrows. "Where everything fits perfectly. Only pure, joy bliss. No bad ending because there is no ending. Happily ever after." As if a lightbulb had went off over his head, he swiveled back to the computer and typed something quickly. 

A bubble of laughter nearly escaped my throat. All he wrote was sad stories where nobody survived in the end. They usually ended in murder, suicide, or even both.  According to him, there was only tragedy in the writing world. The real writing world, apparently. 

"Nothing is perfect," I said, looking out the sliding glass door. A van was snaking its way up the narrow streets, blasting scratchy rock music. The sun was starting to break through the wall of thick, gray clouds. The beach would become very crowded soon. 

"Only if you believe that," Dad said. He smiled at me and it nearly gave me the creeps. Why was he being so cheery? Maybe he'd stayed up three nights in a row and had started to become delirious. Or the cigarettes were actually poisoning his brain and not just his poor lungs.

Everything is perfect, I thought as I looked around the cramped living room. Laundry strewn across the room, soggy papers and broken canvasses littering the floors, the stench of trash that needed to be taken out two days ago starting to overpower the smell of cigarette smoke. It was beginning to seep into the walls and starting to turn my lungs black.