TRIGGER WARNING: ABUSE. please read at your own discretion.
hello there,
a different take on the Dad i have written about for years now.
it has been forever since i posted. i've missed this place.
thank you for the continued support over the last few months. it's appreciated more than you know.
-endless
palace of stars
As children, you're accustomed to a sense of make believe. It's generational: taught by our forefathers, to our grandfathers, to our fathers, and beyond. It shapes you, and in some ways, it changes you.
When you're five years old, Dad pins stars to your bedroom ceiling. With an innocence of a child about to lose his father, you ask, "What are those for?"
Dad grins wide and chuckles, the sound rumbling in his chest. "To keep the monsters away." You stare at him, raising an eyebrow. You're not sure monsters exist, unless your older brother counts. Darry prides himself in scaring you to the point where you've peed your pants and cried to your Momma, but he means well. Darry always means well.
"You mean Darry?"
Dad shakes his head, smiling again. "There are people in this world, Soda, who hurt you just to hurt you. Nothing more to it. I pray every night you never encounter those people, because you're too good for them. You're too good for the ground you stand on."
You don't realize it yet, but when your father dies and your mother remarries, those stars are what you stare at as someone takes advantage of your childhood for years.
Everything stops when you turn eighteen, when your mother kicks out the man who stole your innocence, when you go away to college and it's like you finally have a chance at life again.
You have the entire college experience — great roommates, getting tattoos, getting drunk and throwing up in an alley… everything your father told you to live for, told you you were too good for, has kept you walking and breathing ever since his last breath.
You return home at the age of twenty, after a breakdown put you into a loony bin. Your father isn't home when you walk in the door — though his grave is right down the street — but your mother stares at you from the kitchen. There's fear in her eyes, but you're not sure if that's from the fact you stood on a ledge a few weeks ago or from the fact that you're standing in front of her with your brothers hauling in your apartment decor, as if saying I'm never leaving again.
That fear, that stare, keeps you awake at night like the nightmares.
At 24, in the middle of December, she's arguing with you about her marriages — three, and with each marriage came a loss or a divorce.
"You just don't have any respect for a man that isn't your father. Soda, how many times do I have to tell you: your father wasn't the greatest man. You know that, and for you to be so cold and callous to my other" — she pauses, calculating her choice of words, "friends, is ridiculous."
The birds in your chest rattle in their cage around your heart, your lungs, your ribs. She goes on and on about how you're ungrateful, how you've gotten everything she never had and more, how you and your brothers would not have the life you sit on now if it weren't for the other men in her life providing for you… and it's always the second husband, the one right after your father, that makes your blood boil beneath your skin. It's always the second husband that haunts your dreams, makes your skin crawl just by the mention of his name.
The birds shriek in your blood, your brain, inside of your chest hard enough that the words come out: "He hurt me, Mom. For years."
The car engine cuts before she's even in park. At first, her eyes roll so far back into her head, you're convinced they'll get stuck. "He wouldn't do that."
"He did it for years." The words are hushed, your tongue like sandpaper.
"He wouldn't." She starts to gather her things, and you're running out of time. Fuck.
You hold up five fingers. She stops, her gaze traveling between your hand and your eyes. "What?"
"Five years," you say. Tears blur your vision, crack your voice like you're fourteen again. "He did it for five years."
A breath escapes her chest, but it's a hollow sound. Like her lungs have suddenly grown too small for her body in the span of thirty seconds. "Don't like to me, Soda."
Now it's your turn to feel your lungs shrink. "I am not lying."
And it's that tone, that intensity, stopping her in her tracks. You watch her cry, wrapping her brain around what the fuck you just told her, and you're ready to comfort her as you always have when she says:
"Soda, it wasn't your fault. It will never be your fault."
You feel your inner child screaming for joy, whooping and hollering in a void that you forgot about all those years ago. As that void was filled with secrecy, deceit, and self-loathing. As that void was filled with threats, lies, and fear.
"I'm so sorry I let him into your life. I'm so sorry…" and that mantra repeats for hours, even days after.
The stars have been taken out of your room for at least six years.
As you tape a new set to your ceiling, your walls, and your door, you feel something inside of you change.
As if your childhood self is saying We did it. We lived. We survived the monsters.
Somehow, you did. Somehow, you always will.
Those stars glow in the dark brighter than they ever have.