Journey to the Fatherland

(this is work in progress of my first book, my work may be very little right now but I would greatly appreciate feedback on what I have begun to write...)


I am lying here watching a piece of driftwood being pulled by the current of the sea. As I watch this piece of wood getting closer and closer to the shore and yet never reaching solid ground, I think of my own past, my own struggle against the current of the sea.

I was once on solid ground but I lost my grip some years ago now but the memory is still etched in my mind, the pain still scars my heart. The day I held my father’s hand in mine, the day I had to let him go. The day my world crumbled and I lost my grip on solid ground.

I have since travelled the world in search of him but I have been scarred by what I have found. I look at my scars now and they are a constant reminder of what I did find. Of what I didn’t want to find.

I held my father’s hand as he was slipping away and I whispered a promise to him. A promise that I will never forget where he came home. It was that promise that bought me here, into this house.

Even before I walked through the door I knew something was not right. I could almost taste the distrust, the tension. I pushed these feelings aside hoping I was wrong. Hoping it was my fear talking and not reality.

As I knelt down by the feet of the one person who held the key to opening the door to my father’s past, I could hear the faint whisper of my father in her voice. The Alzheimer’s may have robbed my Grandmother of recognition for who I was but I envied the clouds that circle her, that fill the absence of my father.