R.I.P.
I forgot that I wanted to make note of a second off-experience I had as I was falling asleep last night. The last being the odd feeling of loss over moving out of my apartment a few weeks back. Last night I was having these visions of my father being dead. It was very unsettling in a way I am not sure I can explain. It sounds funny to say "visions" but I was not sleeping yet; just laying there pretty conscious of the world around me still and yet I was feeling these emotions as if it was real and currently happening.
Just seeing him in the coffin was like a knife wrenched through me and felt as if an empire had crumbled or a curtain fallen behind which reality was exposed. I could see the detail of the tie and the fake appearance of his made-up face as if he had ever looked like that in life as we partook in the grueling tradition of staying in a room with a corpse for an entire day. How I detest wakes.
It’s hard for me not to think of death when my parents talk in conversations saying "Well, if I am around next Christmas..."
We don’t express affection much in our family. Speaking it is awkward. Even to the levels we are at now, it’s been a long time coming and not without its strangeness to us all.
I am just seeing who he is and admiring him for that, and yet it seems so close to a time when he’ll be taken away.
It feels so uncomfortable to talk like this. Not because of the subject of death, but the idea of the affection I have.
Then my mother would be alone. With me in the city and my sister working three jobs, what would she have? I’d see her going down the same road as her mother, becoming a total recluse who just assumed being alone as to having any company worrying about her. She’s already lost her oldest son to utter selfishness; what if I wanted to go off somewhere else? I’d be plagued with that guilt that I was abandoning her.
The world would be changed for me in an instant. And, I’d rather it didn’t.
I want my parents to be around to see that I *can* become something. That my life was not wasted by debt and indecision. That I could be something beyond what they feel they are already proud of. I am not sure they even know me. The time my mother wanted the link to my journal I danced around it because though I can have a dozen strangers know my most intimate thoughts and fears, the idea someone in my family would see who I really was terrified me.
If they saw how I feel. How I ached and angered. It leaves me currently feeling shame. All they would do is read, and fear for me. It would be a useless torture to put them through. If they’d only kicked my ass to the curb instead of being so concerned, I could have become someone more worthy of their pride.
Just seeing him in the coffin was like a knife wrenched through me and felt as if an empire had crumbled or a curtain fallen behind which reality was exposed. I could see the detail of the tie and the fake appearance of his made-up face as if he had ever looked like that in life as we partook in the grueling tradition of staying in a room with a corpse for an entire day. How I detest wakes.
It’s hard for me not to think of death when my parents talk in conversations saying "Well, if I am around next Christmas..."
We don’t express affection much in our family. Speaking it is awkward. Even to the levels we are at now, it’s been a long time coming and not without its strangeness to us all.
I am just seeing who he is and admiring him for that, and yet it seems so close to a time when he’ll be taken away.
It feels so uncomfortable to talk like this. Not because of the subject of death, but the idea of the affection I have.
Then my mother would be alone. With me in the city and my sister working three jobs, what would she have? I’d see her going down the same road as her mother, becoming a total recluse who just assumed being alone as to having any company worrying about her. She’s already lost her oldest son to utter selfishness; what if I wanted to go off somewhere else? I’d be plagued with that guilt that I was abandoning her.
The world would be changed for me in an instant. And, I’d rather it didn’t.
I want my parents to be around to see that I *can* become something. That my life was not wasted by debt and indecision. That I could be something beyond what they feel they are already proud of. I am not sure they even know me. The time my mother wanted the link to my journal I danced around it because though I can have a dozen strangers know my most intimate thoughts and fears, the idea someone in my family would see who I really was terrified me.
If they saw how I feel. How I ached and angered. It leaves me currently feeling shame. All they would do is read, and fear for me. It would be a useless torture to put them through. If they’d only kicked my ass to the curb instead of being so concerned, I could have become someone more worthy of their pride.