L'Appel du Vide (Nocebo Effect P3)

(((ratatouille vibes)))

I am despising my parents right now much more than I've ever despised them, and that means a lot, because after seventeen years of their impenetrable opinions being drilled into my mind unsuccessfully, anger and spite are the only items inside of me, and somehow I remember it all, every dinner table discussion based around fallacy and bigotry, every school experience where my peers fucking agreed with their insolence, every fear of being caught in the mere act of existing, but those anecdotes don't concern me anymore, as I've changed so much since moving to America that the troubled kid in Bordeaux is no longer part of my core identity, and it should remain that way, because back then I was actually afraid of my parents.

Now, on the contrary, all that I host is acerbity towards them, and there's a shitton of it. Notwithstanding, I view myself as an integrous person now that I'm back from the dead, a person who won't engage in drama just for something to do, so I prefer to stay away from my annoyingly conservative parents.

But when your parents ask you to clean the dishes with them, you can't really decline that plea, because if you do, then they'll whip out all of these cards about how they raised you and how they feed you and how they love you unconditionally, when in reality that's their job and has been their job since they chose to have a child, and the child had no part in deciding if it would be born or not.

However, my parents are stubborn and as illogical as it gets, my theory being proved by the whole conversation at the dinner table about accusing an innocent man of my near death, and they won't admit to their faults, so in any situation I am forced to help them wash the fancy plates they used to show off to someone they don't even like.

Brendon is innocuous in any form. In fact, he's more of a gentleman than my father is, more of a kind soul than my mother is, more of an artist than my sister is. He should not have been bombarded by my conservative parents' harsh, preconceived notions that were released in the spur of the moment but aren't regretted nevertheless. He should be protected from such atrocity, but alas I cannot protect him, because once I was the one who broke him, so does he even ache for my comfort? I'll just defend him from afar, right here in the kitchen where my parents are tasking me with assisting them in their dish cleaning procedures.

And I guess it would all be fine if we were just washing the dishes in silence, pondering the reasons why we fucking detest each other like any family should, but that is not the case. The case is that my parents are attempting to talk with me, to sort out why we're silent, to discuss what happened and why they will never be sorry for it and why now I have to carry it, even though it's not my responsibility.

I've done my best to block them out, with their shrill voices of the French dialect that they're still utilizing in a progressive world where I have abandoned speaking in the same language I spoke in when I was suffering as a child, but they continue to pester me, to nag me about how I'm such an intractable son, to try everything within a plethora so that I may speak, but what they're doing is not persuading me towards them, rather picking and choosing aspects from disparate opinions and shoving them at me all at once.

It's not working, because I'm not going to trust them, and maybe they're simply looking out for me and my wellbeing, but this is not the way to do it. The way to do it also isn't grabbing my arm and requiring me to address them, but that's what's happening, and my anger is insurmountable.

Grinding the tile below me with my feet wallowing in the energy I've collected out of spleen, I scream, "What the hell do you want?"

"Don't talk to us like that," my mother scolds me, this time in English, yet I'm just as tenacious about my opinion as she is about hers.

"I'm just trying to wash the dishes, okay? You asked me to, remember?" I pivot back to my activities once completing my sixty second quota for malevolence, piling a train of bubbles onto a plate and obliterating it with a sponge promptly afterwards.