One Ticket to Fill a Lacuna

Chapter 3 || The Reveal

Chapter 3-

                My lovely dream visited me again last night. It was just as gruesome, if not more. I wonder how long it will be before I can have a night of tranquil sleep once more.

                Twelve years ago, when he left, it shocked my entire system and my sleep pattern was just of the many things affected. The shock feels the same as it does in the dreams that I continuously experience. It was so sudden, too. He essentially just picked up his belongings, said he was going on a trip, and when his usual two weeks of travel were over, my worried mother had sat by the front door for hours. He was supposed to have returned. She is still waiting for him today, never losing glimpses of hope, but they are becoming weaker. She doesn’t have as much faith in him. Trust is wearing thin.

                I remember the pitter-pattering of my footsteps trickling down the hall as I excitedly ran into his room the night that he was supposed to come back from Bolivia, his chosen travel destination that time. He had even promised that he would bring me back a llama figurine, representing the national animal of Bolivia. I had been so ecstatic to receive the gift, and it never came.

                 I had opened the door cautiously and saw my mother and father’s bed tidily made with the decorative pillows still in place and perfectly positioned. He wasn’t there sleeping for me to jump on and wake up. Now, my mother sleeps alone. The bed is still the same size, she never downgraded even though a double-person bed is no longer needed. But, I’ve noticed on some particular nights when I check up on my mother that she will never sleep on the left side of the bed. That’s where he used to sleep. It just goes to show that she still savors memories of them being together.

                Post closing the door, I was utterly confused, and went back into my bright pink little room, now painted a plain white color.

                We got no letters from him after that, except for one that came maybe a year later. My mother hid it from me, and I have yet to discover where it is to this day. When she had picked it up from our mail box, we had just gotten back from the grocery store. As she read over the return address, she had dropped the brown paper bag containing milk, which promptly spilled all over the floor. The security guard by the apartment entrance who has now been long retired gave us strange looks when my mother ushered me along, leaving the explosion of milk on the ground. My mother was too trapped in the curiosity of the letter to notice that we had left a giant mess behind us. Back then, being so young, I didn’t know of the ignoramus mess we still had ahead.

                Another year had passed, and the excuses of why he wasn’t back were piling higher and higher. Eventually they tipped over in the unstable stack and enveloped me in so many lies that it took many more years to sort them all out. The biggest lie I’d been told was that he still loved me. My mother would assure me that I was still his little girl, and always would be. She would coo gentle words to be when I was distressed, telling me that he was just traveling so much because he wanted to get as many exotic gifts and souvenirs for me as possible. I believed this for a while, but you don’t often hear of people traveling for more than five years with no contact to family that they actually cared for, and so I was increasingly suspicious.

                When I started school, it was the hardest thing. My elementary school would often organize Daddy and Daughter breakfasts complete with glazed donuts and fluffy pancakes doused in gooey syrup. I always went with my Mom, while all the other kids had dad’s to share the experience with. They would ask why my mom was accompanying me when my father was supposed to be there. I would tell them he was traveling. It was easy to make excuses like my mother.