I N V I S I B L E // styles

Chaper One

I’ve never been one to chose.

    So when I walk through my front door to my mother standing, hovering over the kitchen sink with her hands planted upon her hips and her face screwed into an emotion of tension, and my father seated at the table, ankles crossed and back slouched, I knew I’d be making some decisions today. Ones I never planned on making.

    I walked in quietly, letting my presence become known to my parents but neither of them glanced towards me. So I stood, in the doorway to the vast kitchen, my bag slung over my aching shoulders and my eyes casting over my parents with a confused stare. I could feel the stiffness in the room, it was suffocating. I felt like someone was enclosing their fingers around my throat and pulling me backwards, trying to warn me not to make another step into the kitchen but the more I stare at the kitchen, the more curious I begin to feel.

    “I just can’t believe you,” my mother says, her voice thick and curt, like the business woman she is. I can feel the tension rise increasingly in the room when my father heaves a heavy sigh, his stiff shoulders slumping as he runs his hands down his face, showing the tiredness deep in his face. His forehead is crinkling in livid stress lines and his eyebrows slightly raised, as if he was waiting for the moment where my mother would finally look at him and feel the anxiety written clearly upon his face.

    My mother’s shoulders thicken in tautness as her eyes scan the vast green that lies outside the kitchen window. My eyes follow her movements before I transfer to my dad, who’s practically lying across the wooden table, his head in his hands while his elbows rest upon the wood, his eyes shut while his body slumps, like he had lost all of his energy in a matter of minutes. No one had noticed me and I couldn’t help but feel like I had invaded a different territory. Like I wasn’t welcomed here and from the looks upon my parents faces, they wouldn’t accept me with open arms and a kiss on the cheek.

    “How many times do I have to repeat myself?” my father says, loud and assertive. The look on his face swirls from tired to murderously angry and I stagger back, suddenly scared of my father, something that I haven’t felt in years and years. “I’m sorry, okay?”

    “You can say that a million times,” my mother spats, her voice hard and cold. Her face is strictly business, like this talk was like she was at a business meeting instead of standing in the kitchen, speaking  towards my father. “But that won’t change the fact of the matter Jeffery.”

    I can tell by my mothers tone of voice that she’s trying to calm down, that she’s trying to refrain herself from yelling at him. I want to intervene and demand what has happened that has caused them to fight but as I stand there, in the doorway to the kitchen, watching my parents bicker without either of them knowing I’m actually there, I can’t find the words. My throat seems closed and my body is rigid but I couldn’t tell you why. My head’s spinning from the words they are both uttering, yet not one of them have brought up the matter of this all. I want my father to erase the crooked lines upon his forehead and I want my mother to turn around and announce that dinner is ready. But I couldn’t form the words to scream out my arrival at the house. I was too busy trying to figure out the reasoning behind the confrontation.

    “Sorry doesn’t change anything,” my mother suddenly spurts out. I could hear by her voice that she was on the verge of tears. And if I knew my father, like I thought I did, he would get up from his slumped form and stressed eyes to hug her and whisper that everything was okay and that it would get better in the end. But he didn’t. He sat on the kitchen table seat, his ankles crossed and his head bowed. I felt my eyes tear, I knew something was off, from the tone in my mother’s strict voice, to the slumped, stressed look upon my father’s body and face, something wasn’t right.