Dancing with Shadows

River

When I come home a little after midnight, the TV is on. It casts a white light over my father's weathering face. He has a half smoked cigarette hanging from his ajar mouth.

A man comes on the TV and says: What, did you fall out?

And a distraught Sarah Jessica Parker cries: I don't know how to be here.

He shouts: You want to know how to be here? Stop constantly waiting for something!

I recognize the movie. It's one of mom's DVDs, from the boxes in the shed. She used to watch it around the clock, like she was looking for some profound revelation to her own plight. Then, she left. She woke up one night and perhaps the feeling that she was being sapped of air caught up with her. I say it like it happened instantaneously because it had seemed that way. Maybe we missed the signs or we didn't pay attention but she never once said, "Hey! I'm not happy. I hate it here." She didn't even give us the chance to fix whatever was broken. Instead, she just opted out, leaving us behind in the same place she didn't want to be anymore. That was three years ago.

Perhaps that's why I intend to only apply to the junior college right here in our town- not because I don't have the grades to go to real college but so my dad doesn't get left behind once more. 

He is not aware of my presence until I drop my keys in the porcelain bowl and kick the wall in an attempt to dislodge the heavy sludge that has stuck to the bottom of my boots. He perches over the chair's rest and gapes at me, except he's staring past me as opposed to at me. He does that a lot, always looking past things and staring into the distance- never really in a room or present.

"You're home." His voice climbs out of his mouth with great labor.

"Yeah." I drop my jacket on the chair and turn to carrying the stack of cups and plates spread out before him into the kitchen. "Did you take your meds?"

He nods and looks around the room befuddled. "How long were you out?"

I want to say it's the medication but he's been out of it long before he needed medication. My dad has Huntington's disease. I know what you're thinking. Did she know before she left? The answer is no. He was diagnosed a year after and before that he'd had no perceivable symptoms. There's no way she could've known. I don't know if that makes her leaving worse or better.

"Since the afternoon. What did you do today?" He's flicking the embers from his cigarette on the rug sluggishly. I know what he did but I wait regardless, at the off chance that he became a different man in the time I was away from the house. I glance at the space between the living room and the kitchen. The laptop he uses to write is sitting duck on his work table (and I do use the word "work" very loosely.)

"I can't get past the first page. The main character... I can't figure out why she's unhappy." His eyes wander off even as he's speaking.

"I'm missing something," he concludes, taking a long drag at his cigarette before stubbing its butt on the tray and carrying himself up the stairs.

Under the dying bathroom light upstairs, the molecules that make me form two eyes, one nose and a mouth. If I stare for too long, I lose myself and I can't tell where I begin and ultimately, end. The light forms shadows across my face such that my reflection appears despondent. I wonder what is despondent- the hollow shell that I occupy or its core, assuming that at the core is a soul- my soul- no, me. It occurs to me, like it always does when I'm standing in this spot having these very thoughts, that I may be more than one entity- a combination of various parts that converge to create the person in the mirror. If I find out which parts are rotten maybe I could separate them until there is no more bad, just unabridged good. But the good coexists with the unequivocal bad.