Wearing My Smile | ✔

Saturday, April 7th, 2007

The day after your funeral.

Your mother came to my house early in the morning, bawling on the couch where we used to sit watching the television and movies that made you laugh. I felt disoriented and odd. While Luce prepared a tea for her, she started to fill in all the gaps, the questions that you never wanted to answer.

If you were to ask me, Sam, I'd say I didn't give a shit about her reasons—or excuses as I'd prefer to call them. She told me that she had met your father in high school, both of them coming from a filthy rich family who had been feuding for generations, but the two of them had started dating behind their family's back. I was so angry at how so fucking cliched everything was. Two feuding filthy rich families.

She then told me that she realized her problem at the point your mother had an addiction to drugs that she would never admit and that your father might have been drunk way too much all the time. It was so fucking stupid. One night they'd slept together and your mother had become pregnant at the age of seventeen.

Their family took the news with outrage, but your father was set on keeping the baby—you—without the family's support blah blah blah. And so they left town, bought a house in another town, it was good for a while until it wasn't. Your father drank too much, your mother finally admitted she was an addict, you were born premature, eight months in the womb instead of nine, named Samson because you were strong despite the odds and you were the light of their lives.

They'd been happy for a while, she said, but neither of them was used to living on their own without the help from their family so it turned awful real quick with the shouts and the fights. At nineteen, you were almost one year old, they decided to get back to their own family.

Apparently, that was where you had been living before you'd moved here. But even though you'd lived in the main house, you rarely ever met your parents, which was terribly sad, wasn't it, Sam? The pictures of them laughing was those years when you had been still in the main house with some babysitters while your parents met up and found that they were okay as long as they weren't living under the same roof and there wasn't you in the equation, but at that point you were already three years old with no friends whatsoever inside that big house. Ironic and so fucking depressing, but suddenly everything clicked. This was the root of your need to be alone, why at times you needed so bad to go away.

Their selfishness made my blood boil and my hands shake, but your mother didn't seem to notice. She talked about the happy days she'd spent with your father and the start of reconciliation between the two families, but it was still so frail. Things were heading to the better, or at least it was supposed to be. You were almost eight when they decided to try living under the same roof again. She told me this with wistfulness in her voice, as though it was just another sad memory, as if it didn't ruin your whole fucking life, as if no one died.

I imagined that first day you'd come, climbing the mango tree all on your own, how they hadn't come right away when you'd fallen. Maybe if you were there, you'd tell me to forgive them, but I just couldn't, Sam. How could I ever? I wanted to hurt her, to tell her that her selfishness took you away from me, to make her understand, but I didn't. I kept my mouth shut. I listened with my hands in fists, but I listened even though it wrecked me.

After the explanation, she raised her head up, informing about the divorce with tears in her eyes. I let Luce and my father talked. There was nothing I could have added anyway. Everything was about her, what she chose, why she did what she did. Not once she talked about you, what you liked, what her wishes did to you, what her weaknesses made you do. I remembered again the time I'd asked you why you could stand it at all and you said to me wearily, “I can't help it, Roo. They're all I have.”

And there, in that living room with your mother, I was furious. I hated those words for coming out of your mouth, I despise it even now because you had me, Sam, I swear you'd always had me, and yet, still, you didn't know. Now you will never know.

She looked at me after, and said to me, “I forgive you, Roo, for influencing my son in such way. I didn't like it, but I understand now that you both must have been lonely. Were there more girls around, you both would have gone for them, I'm sure. I'm just sad he didn't get the chance. He seemed happy in his last months though, so I thank you.”

Then there was this loud rushing sound inside my ears, like waves hitting the rocks in the middle of a mean storm. I couldn't comprehend past the fact that she thought that I'd turned your sexuality because she was too busy wasting her years getting drunk and high.

And happy in the last few months? Was she fucking joking? You had been miserable. The most miserable you had ever been in the years we'd been friends and this woman who called herself your mother didn't even know.

So, I stood from my seat, took her hand and led her quietly to the front porch. I smiled at her sweetly and closed the door calmly at her face. She didn't say anything, she only looked confused, but I didn't care much since I was trembling with rage the whole time.

Luce knew this, that was why soon after I felt her arms around me, and I breathed loudly on her shoulder because I was angry. You'd told me once after your father had gone that it didn't matter how long you stayed here, your parents would never understand so it didn't matter, and I remembered telling you to give them time, but right then I thought that maybe you were right. Maybe my positive conviction regarding your parents had been a stupid faith based on nothing because I remembered the years you had insisted that you had to fix it and I wanted so bad to believe that there was a way to ease your pain.

I was angry, so angry because even though everything else was shit, at least I wanted to prove to you that they could redeem themselves if they wanted to even if they didn't deserve it.

Perhaps you're right, Sam. Perhaps you were always right and you knew this even before you decided to go for good. All those months you'd spent away from me, drinking yourself to sleep under that mango tree, living days after days in-between uncontrollable rage and hangover, floating, alone in your suffering, not quite alive, mourning over the things you'd lost and the things you didn't even have the chance to have.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream at the unfairness of it because it was all just too fucking sad.