I wonder if this is why my father drank in the middle of the night? Goon wine - Fruity Gordo to be exact - in a coffee cup. The inability to stop the brain. The echos of dreams - nightmares - and their special kind of torture. The pain of past wrongs, the worry about future ones. Wondering if, in spite of paddling fiercely, all this is in vain. "Be the change you want to see in the world". What if the world is simply too full of hurt, making change impossible? What if making your immediate world a better place is an ideal we hold onto because we have to hold onto something? What if the small things do not actually make a difference?
As I try to find my own way out of dependence, I wish more than ever he was still here. I wish he could share in the successes of his grandchildren - his legacy. I wish I could talk to him about his own struggles. The demons that haunted him in the middle of the night. Of how to cure the pain you, to carry part of some else's load without being buried beneath the total. Maybe he would have some insight into how put your own failures to the side. Somehow I doubt it though. The coffee cup held the solution.
My Aunty's voice
I heard my aunty sing yesterday,
though I am assuming which voice was hers.
I never heard her sing like that.
So I sat, listening for a certain tone,
something in the voice that told me "that is her".
I think I found it.
Mind you, I also think I am deluding myself and am purely guessing.
I will ask my cousin and then I will know.
Knowing will be nice.
It is now the only way I can know her voice.
And today, today is the last day of "her" place.
By the end of it, it will no longer be Ruth's.
It will be cut from me, yet embedded so deeply into who I am
it will be a missing limb for as long as I take breath.
It will be an itch I cannot scratch.
A home that no longer has to take me in.
All I have left is some fencing wire, opened bottles of sherry, and random bric-a-brac.
And the voice I am guessing is hers.
