Antiquity

dally (i)

I was born in the center of New York City.
My father was a business man, and he worked hours long into the dead of night, never sparing any time for his children. My mother was a rote woman, she said only the things my father did, and she spent most of her time out on the balcony overlooking the bourgeoisie and poor. My parents never spared any time for me, they construed my unhappiness as something that was normal and left it at that. My father worked 7 days a week, 14 hours a day, and the only thing he talked to once he entered the parlor of our home was the butt of his tobacco pipe. My mother didn't work, didn't clean, but sat in her room, ignoring the desperation of her unloved children by crocheting doilies and sewing bonnets. Due to a lack of upbringing, I decided from a young age that I would do everything in my power to become as isolated and calculating as I could, so I wouldn't get my hopes shot down ever again. I skipped school 3 days a week, whispered incongruous sentiments to the girls in my classes, and smoke and drank. My only friends were my blunt and my liquor. I would go to the alleyway behind the grocer's store and let a sputtering, fat blunt console me into a calming hubris. The liquor burnt my throat and stung like Satan from hell, but I drank it anyways. Tobacco smoke was of my essence and stinging liquor was of my bloodstream. I let myself harden me into something the childhood Dally would never have recognized, but it didn't matter. Life is so futile and you end up in a state of malaise 95% of the time, so what's the point. When I'm getting high or drunk, I won't remember the bruises on my mother's arm or the panties in my father's study. So in my reasoning, I live for ignorance, and I get it by sin.