Reincarnated Poet: Hello again, I know I still have a few chapters left to pound out on The Conduit, but I've been having one-shot bugs for some reason. This one doesn't really have the focus that The Rules of Love did, but it should stay fairly on topic and clear as to the meaning I'm trying to portray. Feedback of any sort is always appreciated.
~R.P.~
It's painful, one might say agonizing. Reality shifts and changes under the harsh sway of bourbon and scotch and I'm left looking at him. I hate him, but I love him. It's not a fine line like some might say; rather it's more three dimensional. A bath or a pool. Layers upon layers of water and feeling.
I'm drowning in it.
I love them both: father and son, so alike and yet so different. Strong confidence and sharp thought. It's hard to see the differences sometimes. It's hard to remember what in him is me. Clearly his eyes, dark and thoughtful, are his fathers. That firm jaw also belongs to the man I love. The hair is mine, but separating a person from physicality is difficult and shallow. I owe more than that to my son.
His need for control. The urge to dominate and control. An incessant drive to be perfect, to be the best simply to say he was better. All of that is his father. His over confidence. His cockiness. His surety that he is something greater. I can see it there, in both of them.
It scares me because I know where that road will take him. I've seen the graying skin and heard the labored breaths. Now he has that angel: Sarah. I see so much of myself in that child. She'll stay with him. She'll watch as the addiction grows and grows until finally she's the one drinking herself to sleep at night amongst portraits and lacquered furniture instead of family photographs and comfortable recliners.
But sometimes, sometimes I see the me in him. I can almost feel it, when he looks are her. That devotion. The caution. His will to protect the people he loves. Self sacrificing core. Self diminishing thoughts and actions.
I think that scares me more. I don't want him to be his father, but I don't want him to be his mother. I don't want him to end up like me. He swears he isn't like him. He tells my over and over, but it's not what I really want to hear. I want to hear something different. I want a promise that he won't be like me. I don't want to hear one day that he's thrown his dreams away simply for someone else.
Sometimes he scares me. Sometimes I scare myself. But I can look past the chance occurrences to see the person I helped create. I can look at him and pick out parts of him that are his father and parts of him that are myself, but when I look at the whole of him and see who he really is, I know that he'll be fine. Sometimes the best thing is the worst of two worlds.