By ARTIE.
My father was very quiet when he passed on.
Proceeding news of the cancer, he grew increasingly irate - relentlessly cursing the world and science and his God for cursing him with such malicious and unjust fate. Such fiery, energetic passion and fury did not last though.
Rather, in his final days, my father was quiet. It was not resignation so much as pure exhaustion. He was not tired from the therapy or the doctors, he was tired from the sorrow. The regret of not watching his son grow up, and his failure to provide for his wife. It was a wretched, numbing agony that weighed upon his heart like snow on an old, leafless branch. In his last hours, my father was begging to break and finally rest, to be buried under that snow.
I once found a half-finished letter in a crumbled ball, washed into the gutter on a rainy day. In smeared blue ink it pleaded that her son please consider inviting his father to his graduation party. He worked so hard, and he does love you, and it would mean the world to him. It had no return address, no signature, just the stains of tears that fell from the sky to wash away all intention.
My mother wasn’t the same, but that change came well before my father’s passing, so when he finally left her the greif was softened, as softened as a bullet can be by such sun-stained armor. She didn’t know, but I used to lean on my door and listen as she meandered through the house, rehearsing the art of futility in an effort to perfect what promised to be a masterpiece of loneliness. If she didn’t have me, she would have thrown such efforts to the wind, and when the threat of my leaving was hurriedly whispered into her ear, she seemed all too glad to take the excuse and smash her future into pieces, throwing mine to the ground to lay with the fragments.
And lay there, I did, each piece of glass eagerly digging into my flesh, red stains seeping their way through my fur. My fur, my god, even my skin reminded me of my mother, every day waking up and being reminded of her soft white embrace, how warm it was, and how cold it became when she hung from her neck, suspended by the rafters of that old house.
“Don’t you get enough sleep, Artie? You always look so tired, like you’re gonna fall over at any second.”
“Can’t sleep sometimes, too much on the mind, you know?”
“Sure would like to have a brain like yours! Always thinking.”
I was seen as a very advanced child, so intelligent beyond my years, and the school wanted me to skip a grade. My mother was all for it, but my dad would have no part of it. He didn’t want me to skip that year of social development, he said. I couldn’t skip that year of making friends and learning lessons.
Ultimately it seems I failed. My fur comes from my mother, and from my father comes my quiet, studious attitude. But I failed to pass on one trait of my father, and I felt no rage about this sickness. I moved straight to the quiet, brooding silence and the dark, straining exhaustion.
Most people don’t ever see it, and those who do only catch the slightest hint of it, but I ache. I ache all over, slightly at first but with growing agony as each day grows old. Sometimes I lay on the floor and don’t get up, either by choice or by surrender. The pills help, but they make me dizzy, and it makes it hard to think straight. I could not have written this, at this hour, if I had taken the pills.
Sleep really is one of the only reliefs I have, but even that has been taken from me. But there’s always tomorrow night for that, right?
