The Uzans Are Alright

Prologue : The Rift

I think what bothers me most about the rift is that there is no one point any of us can concentrate our anger on.

By the time it came about I had realized that my father had always been a masked man, my mother had given and given and emptied herself out long ago and long ago had begun letting other people try and make her whole, my brother had always been the worst kind of traitor who never bothered to hide his favoritism (how he would navigate through our family is beyond me - we were all about letting everyone think they were our favorite) and I was a body of vines, wrapped around the bodies and the stories of others, letting them grow around me until neither of us could imagine one without the other - a new world parasite.

When the rift had, we found that we had long been less than a family - just a group of people destined to not work out, who had kept their eyes closed long enough that they had not looked up from their dinner plates in years, that they had confused their voices for the shrill tinkling of the silver cutlery.

I, of course, had been saving mine for small talk.

My grandfather always said that the only thing worse than sharing the blame is sharing it equally. In fact he said it so much that we could predict it before it happened - an automatic response for anyone who needed advice.

But a true sentiment, nonetheless.