Ten Ways | ✓

way six

(show him how to let go)

* * *

The atmosphere was tense, in a manner that was most definitely suffocating.

Matters were only made worse by the fact that James and I weren't exactly on speaking terms at the moment. Mainly because we didn't want to rub salt in each other's wounds, considering the fresh nature of them. It would be almost too easy to pick up where we left off and increase the magnitude of the problem, allowing the misunderstanding to morph into something that would plague us for a ridiculously long time.

So, this left my family (and James) all seated at the dinner table, having stilted conversation with awkward gaps in between that my dad struggled to fill.

My mom just watched on, shooting me irritated looks every now and then due to my refusal to speak. It wasn't that I hadn't said anything at all; I just trimmed my responses, keeping them as minimal as possible, choosing to stick to monosyllabic words. The last thing I wanted was to clue my dad into various parts of my life, giving him access to information that he didn't deserve to know.

After all, when was the last time he contacted me, wanting to check up on how my life was going?

If he wasn't going to put in the effort to get to know me, I wasn't going to let him.

Besides, it was evident that the only reason he asked about my life was all a part of his game: a way to appease my mom, to make getting help easier. She usually required a bit of convincing, which tended to involve him doing something to show that he actually cared about the family. Although, I really didn't think a few questions here and there counted as him caring, especially when we hadn't heard from him in so long.

If he really cared, he would have made an effort to contact us while he was away. That much was obvious, but my mom seemed to overlook that. Wishful thinking, I suppose. She wanted us to be a happy family, so she ignored all the signs that we weren't.

I used to think the reason she kept letting him back into our lives was out of love. But, love can't make someone that blind. All love does is dull your perception. It doesn't possess the ability to transport you to a world of blissful ignorance; that's a conscious choice one makes, and it's one that my mom has made time and time again.

While I remain clued in to every single one of my dad's tricks, she stays oblivious, living in a world where we're all one loving family—a funny thought, seeing as that couldn't be further from the truth.

In a way, I understood her. Having been separated from her parents for so long, she longed for that familial connection, which she'd hoped to find with my father. Clearly, that didn't happen, but she was in denial about it, not willing to acknowledge that her dream of a real, proper family was dead.