The Contradiction of Solitude(9)

“This is the house your father bought for me after we were married. I want to live here and I want to die here,” she had said tiredly when I demanded to know why we couldn’t leave.

And die there she did.

Six years after my father had gone away, my mother died peacefully in her sleep. An empty bottle of Codeine on the bedside table. Almost a decade of tears still drying on her cheeks.

After burying the woman I had come to loathe, Matthew was put in the system because I hadn’t been fit to care for him. With eyes wide soaked with pain, my brother had clung to me before the social workers had forced him away.

I watched him leave with a numbness that never really left. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t be angry or sad.

If I felt anything, it was relief.

I left that same day I said goodbye to Matthew and found a life somewhere else.

I became someone else.

I changed my last name to Whitaker, my mother’s maiden name. I had wanted no connection to the father I had loved so deeply and lost so totally.

But as time wore on my hatred, my rage, faded into something else.

I forever tiptoed the line between light and dark, never really knowing which way I’d go.

It was hard to plan a future when I didn’t really know who I was.

I struggled to breathe under the weight of a beast that had been given to me.

A gift I had never wanted but received all the same.

During the bad times I would remember what my life had been like before we found out who my father really was.

Ignorance had been the balm for my battered soul.



I liked to sit on the bench beneath the willow tree by the river that ran through the park. I could see the soccer pitch and the tennis courts. It was a great place to watch people. Invent the stories that consumed me.

Today I had brought my green notebook and decided to write.

I wrote for many different reasons. It was a therapy. It was a personal sacrifice. It was a means to an end.

But today I wanted to write just for me.

I started by describing the trees. It seemed like a harmless place to begin.

Thin and crisp,

Victim of fall’s destruction.

Red

Yellow

Brown

Falling

Falling

Down.

Beneath my feet

I walk on the ashes

Of nature’s afterthought.

The words poured out like acid onto the paper. Burning and fluid. They hurt. But I loved the pain.

It was simple so simple. It helped but it wasn’t enough. I needed more.

Different words for different stories…

Ones that hadn’t yet been written.

The sound of a child’s laughter got my attention. I looked up to see a young dad chasing his son around the swings before swooping him up in his big, safe arms and smothering him with kisses.

My pen hovered above the paper but nothing would come.

I watched the father with his son for a while, a soft smile on my face. Forgotten. Stagnant.

“I’m sorry, my baby, baby girl.”

The voice seemed to float out of the air, settling in the grass and trees.

The whispered words of a father’s guilt.

I tore the poem out of the notebook and crumpled it into a ball. Other memories…other stories filled my mind.

“Imagine that all the stars are people. What stories would they tell?” Daddy whispered, his voice drifting in the inky darkness.

Mom was inside with Matty. He had a stomachache and cried most of the evening, ruining my daddy’s welcome home dinner. I hated when he acted like a brat.

It made me want to smack him.

Daddy had been gone for almost two weeks. Two weeks was forever for a seven-year-old girl.

Too long.

Daddy and I lay outside on a blanket. It was our special time. When he would come home and tell me the stories of the stars.

Sometimes I asked him about his fishing trips and why I could never come and he’d shake his head, never explaining why.

But then he’d tell me his stories, and I would forget to be upset about him leaving all the time. About the fact that he was staying away longer and longer.

“You start, Daddy. Your stories are better than mine,” I said, protected and comforted in the warmth of his presence.

He pointed overhead to the brightest start in the sky. “That’s Emma. She’s sad. Her parents don’t love her anymore so she decided to run away from home. She doesn’t have a mom and dad like you do. No one loves her.” I cuddled into my father’s side, confident and sure of his affection. Affection he didn’t even give to Matty.

It was mine.

Only mine.

“Why’s Emma sad?” I asked him; squinting up at the night sky as I tried to imagine the sad girl Daddy was telling me about.

“No one loves her, Layna. She has no one,” Daddy answered, his deep voice rumbling in his chest beneath my ear.

Poor Emma.

“But she has pretty eyes and a nice smile. And she trusts far too easily…” He drifted off, and I wished he’d tell me more about Emma, the sad but bright star.

He didn’t say anything again and the silence made me angry. I wanted my father’s words so seldom given. Not his quiet.

“That one’s Bubba!” I called out, maybe a little too loud.

My daddy laughed. “Tell me about Bubba,” he said.