Lost

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Lost.

I go upstairs despite my father’s feeble attempts at keeping me near him. He probably thinks I’m mad at him after his fuming words and enigmatic feelings were dropped on me yet again. But I’m not angry.
We had just come in from him showing me how to change the oil on my car. “You just turn this… turn this nut right here.. AARRGGHH!” I let out a silent giggle as he struggled with the oil pan and exhaled his foreign language of cursings. I ducked under the car to lay next to him and thought about how these are memories some kids live to remember. Me, they’re memories I live to forget.
The rest of my family? At the movies. Don’t worry, I was invited. Quietly opening my door my mother dripped her honey laced with confession and asked me to go. That was the second time she had spoken to me today. The first was in the midst of a heated argument on account of my new car. That’s all she seems to be able to muster anymore; as she fights for her sanity she turns the fight on us. Yet when the red wanes from her eyes and the memory of a gunshot fades, she collapses on a couch, exhausted, where I cover her with my blanket, and all is forgiven.
After coming in from the garage my dad swears he smells something strange and dowses the kitchen in Febreeze. He then goes upstairs to change and wash. Me, I open the door to my fridge and look at the food stuffed in so tightly that if you take something out it takes 10 minutes to find a place to put it again. Communal generosity breeds food and lots of it after a tragedy.
But all I can do is stare. I slowly shut the door and turn around. I stand eyes riveted to the same white counter tops I have seen my whole life, with the same silver sink shining from the light of the same old lamp hanging from the same white ceiling, and I’m lost. I spin around and look at the table where I ate my first birthday cake and I remember. I glance at the wall with all our heights written on it and memories flood my mind. The spot in front of the door where the tile on the floor is a different pattern catches my eye and I start to reminisce. Yet the tears blur my sight and course down my cheeks. I don’t know where I am. Where do we go without ever knowing the way?
Lost.

My mother is lost in her screaming. My father is lost in his spraying. And I am lost, lost with familiarity, stranded from security, and stumbling in sanity.
My father comes downstairs and gives me a hug, apologizing for the third time that night telling me that he’s on the end of his rope. Whilst the battle of the oil pan was under way, the radiator was penetrated with a wrench. We didn’t discover the martyr until our faces were stained with it's dripping green blood. The death of my radiator was my fathers breaking point.
I go upstairs to be alone. To avoid my father’s embrace that he seems to need more than I do. I go upstairs to be afraid. To curl up in a ball on my bed and get warm from the heat of my dog laying next to me. I go upstairs to be angry. To gaze at the computer screen until my eyes are out of focus after refusing to heed the advice of my friends.
My room is my barrier against the endless stream of cards in the mail of pathetic remorse. It protects me from the piles of books about “losing someone dear” or “how to go on after someone has gone”. It blocks out the stabbing kindness of the masses as they come to show their pale distress.
And as we walk the road gets longer. So we run to catch up only to collapse with the effort. Each night a new struggle. Each morning a new reminder. Fall asleep to life and wake up to a nightmare.
We wander aimlessly through the streets of grief, and our friends become cartographers. Now and then I blindly stumble upon a member of my vagrant family, and it takes us a minute to recognize where we are, and who we’ve run into. But once we do, we walk hand in hand, towards all that was right, and all that was clear, so we can be a family again.