I Heart You <3

As I parked my car outside, I had a foreboding feeling in my stomach. Before removing the keys from the ignition, I sat and stared at the front door not sure what was out of place or askew but I knew something wasn't right. A gust of wind swept past and the curtains rippled and I realised the sliding door was open and through the gap I could see someone lying on the floor. Within minutes, I burst through the opened sliding doors and I was knelt beside the body of my father sprawled out on the living room floor battered to death. Even though I was in shock, I called the paramedics and stood 10 feet away from him in the kitchen until they arrived. They rang the doorbell several times but I was immobilized and could only stare at my dad's form shaking to my very core of being. So many things ran through my head between the ten minutes it took for the paramedics to arrive but many of them stemmed from the basics like: When?! What!! Why?

When the paramedics realized that no one was answering the front door, they came around to the back and cautiously stepped through the open sliding door. The female medic was speaking to me but her words were blurred in translation in my mind. I was having a hard time focusing, it was effort enough trying to stop myself from collapsing on the floor. I kept repeating to myself, I am strong; I am strong like a mantra to stop the tears from falling. I shook my head and started to pay attention to the questions the medic was asking.

When did I discover the body? I just came home from school. Did you touch anything? Just the telephone, I've been stood in this very spot since then. I've been dealt a raw deal in life like many other people co-habiting this earth but the difference between them and me is I chose not to wallow in self-pity and play the victim but rather get up off my ass and do something about it. I go to church, pay tithes and give respect where respect is due. Despite my surroundings I'm an upstanding resident and I like to think that I'm destined for great things. So why does my life seem like a series of unfortunate events, is a question that only God can answer but whenever I look up with a quizzical glance he's always giving me the silent treatment.

I've never been particularly close to my father, this probably stems from the fact that we only met officially when I was fourteen years old. Prior to that, I lived with my mum who dragged me off to live in the sunshine paradise of Barbados along with my step father and my one year old brother. To keep a long story short I never felt that I belonged in Barbados, I felt that its simple quaint way of life would never suffice for the grand scale of my dreams and constantly constructed elaborate fantasies of how I would escape. On the eve of my fourteenth birthday a shocking revelation, or at least that's what I made my mum believe, came to light that my step father was not my father but rather an imposter who apparently was considered a worthy substitute. As I was not convinced of this, within one year I demanded to live with my real dad in London and much to my mum's apprehension she agreed to at least let me visit for the summer as a trial. I wonder if she knew that I wouldn't return for another four years.

I had only been living with my dad for two years at this point and even though we weren't exceptionally close, it's still traumatic to walk into your house and find a dead body chilling on your living room floor. I checked my coat to see if any blood had managed to stain it and realized that the front of it was smeared. That's it. I started to breathe really shallow and curse towards the heavens, I thought that I was silently doing this but by the reactions of the paramedics, who stared with concerned expressions and darting glances, I knew they were thirty seconds away from calling the psych ward. I gathered what was left of my sanity and muttered through choked sobs 'it's all too much...ya know' and left with my dignity intact and a few sympathetic looks from the medics.

By this time the spectators had arrived, some neighbors offered their support if needed even if minimal but no one really offered a committed plan of action to help me, this 17 year old girl deal with the tragedy of losing her father.

Incidentally my dad had become victim to a vengeful business partner who harbored ill feelings towards him because my dad dressed him down in front of some very important people in their circle. You see, there was a reason my mother ran off to Barbados in such a hurry, my dad is not exactly what you would call a model citizen. He's quite established financially although not legitimately and can be deemed as a person who shunned the rat race for a more shady way of getting on the fast track. At the age of 42, he hadn't held a job in 12 years and never had plans of doing so. My dad is not a drug dealer, although I can't deny that at one time he probably was a street pharmacist and it was from this trade that acquired the start up money to invest in other ventures.

So as soon as the funeral procession became a distant memory and the tombstone inscribed with the words despite my distress at its blasphemy:

Colin Henry Evans, 1963- 2001, loving father, devoted son, See you at Heaven's Pearly Gates was erected in contradiction to the true location of his soul, I was put on a plane to live with my paternal grandmother in Atlanta until the age of 18 where ill buckle down and have no distractions.

Or so I thought.