Seated across from me at the kitchen table was my father. His hands had been cupped over his face since I had entered the room, which was typical because he had convinced himself I killed my own mother to stop the guilt of his own actions. He was disgusted by my presence just as much as I was disgusted to call him my father, and in our minds we were destroying each other, playing out scenes of homiscide we wish we could commit.
"What kind of misery did I cause for you to turn out like this?" I asked.
I waited for his answer. In fact, I was desperate for his answer. I noticed that he only kept to himself as if there were something eating him from the inside -slowly and painfully. It silenced his thoughts that I imagined to scream like a drowning child. He revealed his face and dropped his hands infront of him into the table. It has been said that the eyes are the windows to the soul, yet it seemed as if his windows were boarded with wooden planks and hammered into with 9 inch nails as he hid inside the empty space he called his soul. I watched him closely. The muscles in his throat started to move and his adam's apple moved up, then back to where it rested before.
And even though he seemed almost indecipherable of emotion, I could almost see that he painfully longed for something else in this life, yet my sympathy for him was easily dismissed because I used to be hollow inside, just like he was. I filled myself with a violent grudge against him and sometimes it did fill me, and at other times my life felt like I was simply walking through a dark, emotionless fog as I went along with my daily actions. Knowing that my father resented me felt like a decaying force inside. It made me into a black void that I filled with more hate for him.
He worked late shifts at a gas station not far from where we lived, earning money to barely support our “family” and feed his life altering addiction. He claimed that the voices he heard inside of his head scream and destroy him if he didn't give them what they want, and what they wanted was drugs, and for him to kill his two daughters. The last thought had disturbed me from the moment he screamed it, literally losing his mind in a battle with schizophrenia. He carried a pocket knife with him, hidden in the sleeve of his worn out leather jacket
"Just in case" as he always said to me, and walked out the door.
There was a senile, murderous look in the glimmer of his eyes as if, if he had the opportunity to, he would kill me with that knife in a heartbeat. He would kill us.
Ever since my mom left, leaving me breathless, and devastated over her absence my dad just hasn't been the same, although he was never actually right in his mind but he changed and I can still hear the words, "It's all your fault' echoing in my empty mind. Although, I was only 13. That was almost two years ago. Almost two years without a mother, two years without the feeling of love, two years with a drug addicted father, and an 11 year old sister who cries so hard into her pillow it could keep you awake feeling guilty about nothing, and sometimes, I would cry myself to sleep and hold on to my pillow as if it were my mother assuring me she was there for me, yet I was only torturing myself. When I opened my eyes I was reminded she was ripped away -ripped away only long ago.
Thinking about the past made me scream inside, it made me swallow sleeping pills and I couldn't remember much when I woke. I watched a little girl sit on the floor by the window of the living room staring at the empty darkness of the street before her. It was Lucy, my sister. "Kylie" She whispered. I turned to her, examining the hazel eyes that were staring sorely into my mine.
"Why? Why does daddy do this to himself? Why does he do this to us?". Her voice, so shakey. The tears in her tired eyes reflecting moonight as she set her gaze on the stars, pressed her fingtertips of one hand against the glass, and closed her eyes, allowing her tears to fall. I knew she was referring to to why our father did drugs, and swallowed prescription pills by the bottle but I couldn't explain to her that our father had schizophrenia. It wasn't that I wanted to hide it from her, she just wouldn't understand.
