The Moment

Welcome to the World

The moments leading up to this one, in particular, weren't full of glitter and shiny stuff- it was a long, painstaking chain of life lessons and self-realization. I guess the best place to start this is when Roy Park Inc. was established. I was born and raised in a small suburb located in Aurora, Colorado. At the time, my house was smack dab in the middle of undeveloped land that stretched for miles around. The Thursday of September 20, 2001, is what many refer to as my birthday. That Thursday was so much more than just my birthday though- it was my day of reckoning and would remain that way for nineteen years. The day that I was born was the day that I was introduced to hardships and the brutal realities that I would eventually come to face as I grew older. That nippy and clear day- a foreshadowing of sorts- was the day that marked the beginning of a new soul's cold and dejected journey to resolve the question that everyone asks, "What is the meaning of my life?" Now I could give you my take on this question in a short and sweet package with a bow on top or give you a cliché answer like "Life is only what someone makes out of it...", but what fun would that be? The hard truth of it all for me was that the meaning of my life and happiness would only present itself only if I could manage to overcome the hurdles that life threw my way.

These hurdles sprouted from my father. Now I know what you're probably thinking- oooooh a boy with daddy issues, but my father left an imprint on me that I both thanked and hated him for. In simple terms, my father taught me about being the man that I wanted to be by constantly manifesting himself into a man of many mistakes. As a child, I was too naive to really understand everything that was going on. The first couple of years of my life were full of the typical emotional turmoil of a young child coupled with the turmoil one faces while trying to decipher trust and fatherly love.

My father wasn't all there physically or mentally. Physically, he was working at his liquor store for fourteen hours a day; mentally, he was constantly looking for a way out of the life that he built for himself. The physical interactions with him were usually reserved for Sundays when he would close his store for the day. Those days were always something I looked forward to- but instead of spending time with his three sons, he would be too focused on his beer or what was happening on the TV to ever fully be there for us in any way. If he wasn't getting angry with my mom, he was abusing us and depriving his three sons of a real father and a true man to look up to. In a life that the old me wished he could live, a person's dad is supposed to be their superhero. Fortunately for me, that version of my father was a delusion. I tried so hard to make him something in my head- a fallacy created by my own childhood desire to have a dad that I could meaningfully call a superhero. I so desperately wanted him to be different and be a hero to me. I wanted him to be a man that I could look up to as a role model. Alternatively what I got was a head full of delusions and wishful thinking. What life gave me did not match the reality that I constructed in my head and I couldn't come to terms with that. The fictitious version of my father eventually grew into a monster that haunted my subconscious as time passed. I knew that something was wrong with my parent's marriage, but my mom sheltered me a lot from the truth. She wanted me to live a somewhat happy childhood and wanted to see me have a normal life.

Being the A1 mom that she is, she always strived to put a smile on her sons' faces. Her lifelong goal since my eldest brother was born was to make him and eventually her three sons as happy as possible. Whether it was by spending most of her savings to support us playing travel hockey, attempting to get us everything that we wanted, or just sheltering us during the early parts of our lives from the actuality of our harsh upbringing, she just wanted us to be happy. Although happy in those moments, this wasn't the kind of happiness that "the moment" encompassed. I know that she did her best for us and I just want to say that I love my mom to death and will continue to thank her for everything that she did for us. Even so, the happiness that I felt in those moments was all fake- a facade. That happiness acted as the curtains to a really bad and fucked up to play that was the life I was born into. The jarring life that I was born into would only continue to get worse after the moment that I would like to call "the boiling point".

Fallacies

By Roy Park

My smile was a fallacy...

Hiding my pain.

Hiding my sorrow-

Hiding it all from the rest of reality.

My smile was a fallacy...

Concealing my problems.

Concealing the scars-

Concealing all the blood I had to bleed.

My smile was all just one big fucking fallacy...

Masking my worry.

Masking my thoughts-

The thoughts of my unmet childhood needs.

Like I said...

My smile was just a fallacy;

Maybe that's just how it was meant to be.