Thoughts and Rambles

another piece for forensics - OI

At what moment does your life become your own? At Birth? No, you are owned and helpless, unwitting and unaware. Life is food and sleep. But you are listening, listening to and learning from Dad and Mum. Your 'rents, they make you.

And if your dad strikes a copper and ends up in The Slammer, well, that's stirred into your pot.

School arrives(*EDIT*), but you are not free. Once again, you are owned, This Time by the teachers who have heard of your rep and know of your dad and decide without cause that remedial work is your lot.

They don't see into your flat. They don't see the Angelic faces of Marna or Teeter, your sibs who had no Dad or Mum to learn from because mum spent her days weeping and her final nights little more than a zombie at the factory. But even then, I suppose, they were watching, learning that our brief lives are never our own, and the future is as murky as the London sky.

Mercifully, your final term ends. Exams show you to be equal parts unemployable and incorrigible, but it doesn't matter, as that is how they show everyone to be.

And for the first time, you have a choice.

You took a blanket over your last memories with mum, remembering her fitful sleep and her cold face Staind with tears. You listen to your brother and sister-- children you've raised-- arguing in front of the telly, and wonder what you've done.

When will you be more than the sum total of your rents many mistakes. . .

And your one large one.

When does your life start?

And in a fit, you rummage beneath your bed, retrieve your passport and all the savings you own, and stare into the mirror.

Nobody stares back.

You repeat your name. " Clara." A whisper that gains strength." Clara." Because unlike your life, your name cannot be lifted from you. Friends, family, teachers-- thieves all-- have taken everything else, but they grudgingly agree; the name is yours. Even to this one, it is sacred.

You stare at the name in your passport and look out over Marbury Street, at the buses that run the same routes, at the same times, carrying the same blokes. They've given up, trade a teachers for bosses, and will live the rest of their lives in responsible agony. And you vow you will never be like them.

You stroke the world map, yellowed and torned. . . Together with a Celtic cross and journal, they are the few pieces of dad you've allowed to remain. 100 red text supposably mark 100 South LaSalle dad performs for strangers across the globe.

At least that's what mum used to say. . . And maybe she was right but. . .

There is no tack in London.
Now, tomorrow, he is coming home.

According to the wanderer, dad's incarceration was the result of " extraordinary circumstance," and Mum's recent death qualifies him for early release. We will return to your flat, tomorrow night, and eight-year-old he has never met, and to Teeter, a 13 he will not want to.

He will not return from prison to you.
Not when your actions had a hand in sending him there.

You remove dad's weathered leather journal from the trunk in the closet, the volume entitled 1995.

You quietly fill a bag-- 1 is enough, because I'm 18 years old there's little to remember-- and wait for night to fall, and for unfamiliar stars to call you far away.

And you never look back.

Both Of Me By: Jonathan Friesen