Chapter Text
My mother used to complain that my father never came when she called. Called it malicious, an intentional act of ignorance. He'd never even turn to look to acknowledge her, just sit with his back away and continue on like nothing had happened to stir him otherwise. I remember being sent on countless trips to receive him.
I should’ve known then how I’d found him, completely unaware, eager to rise once made aware he was needed, always trailing a hand along the shell of his ear, right or left, catching on the lobe, giving it a slight pull as he would rise, that it wasn’t on purpose, that he wasn’t pretending her voice didn’t exist, but what my mother said was what I believed. If she would’ve told me the sky was green and the grass was blue, I would’ve nodded and repeated it on as gospel to everyone I passed by who dared to say otherwise.
But now, I get a little closer to call out to him, place my hand on his shoulder and wait for him to turn to me, wondering now if she were still here, would she complain I never held her with two hands, or clung to anything tight enough? If I would too become the useless man returned home from war with less to offer now than before, always seeking out some way to make things harder for her, always harder for her.
I’d loved my mother, only to become what she’d hated most, and hated my father, only to become him. The hatred melting into a resentment I couldn’t commit to in my entirety toward my mother, and a tenderness in my chest for my father, his sword hanging wrongfully on my waist, yet another consequence of the shame under the roof of my mother, long after she’d left it.
Somewhere out there, I’d prayed before that she had found someone who made her happy, a family she deserved, and only now do I realize what a curse that would be, if she received what she’d given. Sometimes, it felt a fitting punishment, other times I just wished home would become a little louder again, that it wouldn’t feel so empty, that she would return to it, that life would return to it.
-
My father brushes my hair in the mornings.
I didn’t ask him to, only sat struggling with my one hand and my headful of unruly hair out somewhere where I could be seen the first time, and he’d taken a place behind me, standing, though he used to be able to sit and do it, before I’d grown some, before the body become man without worrying for the mind’s age and ability to catch up with it.
‘Why don’t you cut your hair?’, he’d ask me, and I’d answer just because I liked it this way, not that it was because he didn’t cut his hair. That for as long as I’d known him, his hair continued to grow in length each year, inches added to the ponytail he contained down his back without fail. He made it look easier than it was, he used to. Now, I can see where the darkness was beginning to thin out to give way to the pale white of his scalp, the roots long having brightened into something wiser.
When he pulls it out of the ponytail to bathe, I can see how the hairs cling to the ribbon, separating from his head without resistance. He’ll clutch them in a loose fist, then release them to the others trapped at the bottom of the waste bin. I wonder how many more days he will tie both our ponytails before it becomes a chore he carries just for me, and his wooden brush will end up dying a stale death on a counter, forgotten, carrying the last of what once a bushel, holding onto what he was unable to.
-
When I’d wake with a fever as a child, my mother would dote on me, crouching by my bedside with a bucket of cold well water and a rung rag to press to my forehead. She’d call me sweet names, like ‘sweetie’, and ‘baby’. She wouldn’t let me out of the bed for just about anything. And though I hated being sick, I liked being taken care of, I liked the warmth of her arms wrapped around me and her kiss laid to my forehead. I’d call her ‘mommy’, and she wouldn’t say I was too old a boy to do so anymore. I was her baby all over again in that moment, and wished I could never leave.
I’d tried to fake it once, poorly, but in the endearing way a child would, too bashful to simply ask to receive some of that love again. My mother had seen right through me immediately, said she hated liars, so I never did it again. She’d compared me to my father, who had returned from war the first day with a fever and asked to lie down. Men weren’t supposed to be so weak, she’d said. And I’d nodded, not in agreement, but making a mental note in that moment not to be weak.
But, I’d also returned from war with a fever.
Not immediately. It was something that brewed overnight my first day home, then wore me down the morning after. I’d called to my father then, the only one I could, and he did not come. Only when I’d pulled my aching body out of bed to find him was when I realized why.
He’d pressed the back of a worried palm to my sweating forehead and asked why I was out of bed, why I didn’t call for him, and when I said I did, he’d removed his hand from me, and rung his ears, left and right, with both hands for a moment, before urging me back to my room. I’d realized then why he didn’t answer. Not my mother, not me, surely not a myriad of other people and things either, since he’d returned.
The look of horror on his face, something beyond frustration or surprise with the failure of his body was something that weighed me down with guilt for making him realize it.
He’d set up a chair outside my room, a place he ate, slept, and sat for the duration of my illness, always making sure he was close enough, that he could hear me, that he would answer this time.
My father didn’t wrap his arms around me, or lay a kiss on my head, or call me sweet names, but he sat outside my door, came for me with heavy footsteps each time I called, and led spoonfuls of savory broth to my lips as the heat poured out of my body.
And he’d beg under his breath when he thought I was asleep after checking my head in the night for the hundredth time, for me not to be taken from him, not when I’d just come back, not after all we’d both survived to be here right now.