peeling from the inside out

Your father has never hit you.

(Sometimes, you wish he would.)

--

Instead, when he drank himself out of his mind after your mother finally died- instead of hitting you and yelling drunkenly about how "you killed her Harry, you killed her"- he held you close and ran his hands over your face, whispered something so slurred the only words you recognized were "her eyes", and then called you Anne.

You remember that it was your own head screaming "you killed her, you killed her" and you felt so crushed under the weight of your father's sorrow that you just sat there.

You don't remember how you found out when your mother died. You remember this instead.