Crash Landing [✓]

12

Chapter Twelve | WON'T YOU TAKE YOUR CLOTHES OFF?

When I was in High School, the worst thing which could have possibly happened in my life was the unfortunate event of my father's car accident; resulting in a brain injury which was inflicted upon him during the time of the crash and due to the severity of it he didn't recover easily.

Only when he had recovered from the clots and wounds, he had developed a nasty illness called Dementia. He became weak, and his behaviour deteriorated, day by day. Which was crazy because I had always thought it could only happen to elderly people, the ones who knitted scarves and drank herbal tea, —though stereotypical, it was more likely to happen to people at old age from what I could gather anyways.

Never had I imagined that my father would become a victim of it, at an early stage. Yet that had been the reality for quite some time now, and it was painful to process even now. I didn't know what to think of it, when he simply wasn't the same anymore.

He wasn't the man that raised me when I was a child, not the one who fed me and played with me, took me to the park and collected random objects with me, or supported my crazy whims to get every flavour of ice cream possible at 12AM.

Till this day he was shacked up at a health institution which took care of him as much as possible, keeping his hallucinations and aggressive reactions at bay, since once upon a time my mother and I had tried to aid him and failed miserably.

We didn't give up on him though, even if that was what it seemed like mostly. We simply had to get on with our lives and face reality, that he just didn't remember who we really were and what was going on around him most the times. If anything, it wasn't his fault.

My mom left the city to pursue her passions eventually, and I stayed to make something of myself or at least tried to. I'd check up on him daily but over time, he'd stopped speaking to me, because he couldn't piece together who I was and why I was there. And now he would simply stare at my face and then look away, not even bothering to register me at all. I didn't understand why... but I merely felt like I'd lost him forever at times.

Only at the present time I was in, I finally understood what the true feeling of loss was.

Because right now, I was at a funeral.

Zachari Taeyun's funeral to be precise.

Orphan. Software engineer. Genius hacker. Best friend and younger, brother figure of Milo Delgard.

Suddenly gone. Dead. Six feet under.

I barely managed to maintain my factitious face of despair and ache until the end of the service, as I clenched my fists and glared down at the soil on the ground, while the ceremony unravelled, which had been prepared by the Agency and their Jewish Association Funeral Directory. Apparently they had many private links with all sorts of Funeral Directories. In case of death and collateral damage.