Chapter Text
A lingering feeling of anger, and a need for more. There’s this refusal of reality, for there’s not a chance this is all there is.
Empty nights, empty promises, empty teenage kisses, empty actions and breathes. I’ve been breathing the air in, a stinging feeling in my chest, perhaps the air or something else.
I’ve never breathed well; clearly breathed without struggle or discomfort and pain. Maybe it didn’t help that at 14 I was in a gas station bathroom with my mate, his finger injecting a needle and then a piercing in through my nose.
We couldn’t help but laugh our lungs out that night, the tears on the other hand had only started when the scotch from my father’s study did.
I wore stretched out raggedy graphic shirts, and baggy falling apart jeans with them. I contrasted heavily to my hard-working American home, a horrid little thing next to my mother, father, and the reflection of them. Somehow no matter the angle they stood on pillars, needed to perch down to my level. I was vermin and disease.
‘Only good men get good breaks.’ My father told me, pouring his old alcohol into his scotch glass. He winked at my 10-year-old face, filled with unease, clicked and placed the lid back over the sharp angled glass bottle, dim in the lighting that hid everything yet showed me everything. ‘Work hard son, it’s a rough life out there. And by the end of it, you’ll have something to show for it.’
My father was a hard worker, from the second I was born to the day I turned 15 he made it absolutely clear to me that unless I had worth to society, I had no worth to him. ‘I didn’t raise a slacker’ His rough hands pushing my back, my feet stopping me from falling face first on the concrete. Preparatory school.
Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I hadn’t attempted to set the place ablaze. My old girlfriend, Gwen, called me Jason Dean because of that, said she would’ve been my Veronica had we met earlier. We watched Heathers 1989 after that, and I’m never watching it again. It felt like my lungs were being squeezed and that the cameras were back on me. I hadn’t felt like that since being with Courtney.
The days I spent with these women fade away in my mind, true they were extraordinary women, but no matter who they are. They never helped me find myself. I was wondering through the dark trying to grab onto something, I struggled to hold onto them, and the only constant was the figure of my mother and father somewhere in there, telling me to give up and go home. But if I did, I’m certain my real father would have told me I’m a muck up, slacker, no good man that he wouldn’t let on his couch, or in my old bed, if it got him millions.
That’s the Tarun way I suppose.