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Every day has always been the end of the world. For as far back as your memory will comply with you, every day has always been the end of the world.
You sit in front of my mirror, back straight and eyes forward. Your father’s voice rings in your ears like a static hum, like a radio station struggling to reach the airwaves. The only thing you can acknowledge is the hum of the electric razor buzzing, sliding across your head. You make eye contact with yourself in the mirror. Buzzed hair, and white teeth stare you down. You're unrecognizable. Every day was the end of the world.
Aging didn't bring with it the clarity and stability your father promised you it would. The end of the world never stopped occurring within the walls of your father's house, even after his passing. You buzz your hair out of habit, like a father son tradition in an attempt to reach out to someone you barely recognize in retrospect, but you can never bring yourself to sit in the tub to wash off the shaved hair. Everything felt familiar, but distorted, as if nostalgia could come back wrong, like a melancholic snowball with a bittersweet rock packed into the center rammed right into the center of your head.
One morning you wake up to find that every living breathing person on this earth has woken up to your reality. It's the end of the world. Not much changes for you, as you've had the last twenty-eight years to adjust. The only thing that shifts is that for the first time you’re on an even playing field with the rest of the world. Nobody ever wants to talk to you when you're experiencing the end of the world all by yourself, you're irrational, at best, a danger to the way their world view functions at worst.
The hallway never got shorter, even as your legs got longer, in fact you're convinced the hallway of your father's house might have even gotten longer. You’ve always wished this place would burn down. You walk through purgatory, and limbo at the door. Your curiosity feels morbid and your stomach twists, as you stare out the peephole of a door that's never felt like yours, to be met with a man without a visible face.
There should have been more hesitation when reaching for the doorknob, unsteady hands unlocking the entry of your enclosure, leaving yourself feeling exposed in ways you can't articulate. You get a good look at the tall stranger ducking under the doorframe of your father's house. Standing tall at easily 6’5, there's a part of you that has to bite your tongue. Your father would have asked him how the weather is up there. Instead of regurgitating the only thing you could think to say, you silently let him into walls that have housed a special kind of hell you only see if you're god’s favorite victim. That was a bit dramatic.
You can't promise yourself he’s even a person, but you're not quite sure you care. The world has to end eventually, and it's been ending for a long time. There's a part of you that hopes if you die tonight in your sleep you won't have to see your father in the after life.
Days pass where you can't quite articulate why it feels like they invented a new special kind of hell for you as of recently, but you know it to be true. Eyes locked in the kitchen while reaching for a beer make you nauseous, fingers abruptly grazing while passing a cigarette makes you consider if your father's shotgun would fit in your mouth.
Never before have you had to share these hallways with this many people, let alone a person whose head reaches the ceiling. If this house is the whole world, then the whole world must be too cramped for you. Your shoulder presses up against his arm. You think about buzzing your hair again.
Small talk is only natural, you know this because your father always made small talk. You don't actually know what small talk is, but you know it exists, surely nobody would talk about something that didn't exist. Fleeting conversations have you craving to ask questions you're not sure you’re allowed to ask just to keep him around. Something about this feels pathetic to you, so you tend to let him go.
The pessimistic 6’5, man with a receding hairline makes his home on your couch, surrounded by others that come and go. You've learned he's fourty-six, learned to speak Polish during his youth spent at University, and never spends his time in any one place too long. Doing the math in your mind you realize this man is old enough to be your father. Your eyes glance down the hall as you connect these dots in your mind. You think you might be haunted.
You bite your lip, hands gripping hair tensely. You ask yourself what it even means to be haunted. You ask yourself if you even remember your father, today the answer is no. This is definitely the end of the world.
You spend brief moments with your tenant living on your couch. Asking questions, and exchanging conversation to pass the time. After the first week you've stopped asking yourself what is and isn't rude. You don't think people care about that anymore now that the world is ending for them too. You try not to make eye contact for too long, it makes you feel sick in ways you didn't know you could.
After taking a drag from his cigarette, he says something you're not sure you'll ever unhear. It leaves you with a dry mouth, and a head full of static and noise, not thoughts.
“You know something about you reminds me of a younger version of my father.”
You can't ungrip the chair. You can't catch your breath. You can only manage to choke out a forced nervous laugh to fill the silence. You're not a special case, every son is just his father, come back wrong, come back a little different, but still at his very core just his father.
Your company attempts to backtrack, possibly regretting the statement he let slip out into the open air. He clears his throat, letting out a polite cough. You didn't even know coughs could be polite.
“He was for what it's worth, from what I've been told a good man, despite being rather absent in my upbringing.”
He looks as though he's searching for words that he feels would lessen the offense he's imagining you're experiencing in your mind. You choke on your own spit. This conversation is the only thing left in your mind hours later as you're hunched over your father’s bathtub nervously vomiting into it.
You're not quite sure what it means to be a good man. You're not quite sure what it means to be a man at all. When you feel particularly disconnected from this idea of manhood, you consider shaving your hair. The epitome of “man”, might have just been your father. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't, but that's all you have as a reference point as you lay silently in your father’s bed wondering if you could just let the sun bake you if you opened the windows.
What does it mean to be a good man?
You're not sure you've even really wanted to be a man at all, how can you want to be something that you don't even know how to define. You roll over facing the door to your father’s bedroom, to avoid the nightstand in the corner of your vision. You fall asleep asking yourself what it means to be a good man.
The next day you tell yourself that at the end of the world definitions of words don't matter. Just let anyone with a pulse be a man. You've never authentically once felt as though you could describe yourself as a man in any way that matters, but the way your new roommate calls you his “good man”, has your mind trailing to places that should be kept between you and the Lord.
He calls you “the man of the house”, and you ask yourself if you're turning into your father. Sometimes this makes you want to collapse to the floor. Sometimes this feels like a role, like a presentation of masculinity almost in an ironic sense. “Man of the house” feels like a performance, one you don't mind putting on for the right person.
Not once have you pointed your father's shotgun at your most well known guest. You're not sure what disgusts you more, the fact that you couldn't bring yourself to put him down like a dog even if he was something inhuman, or the genuine attachment you have to another living, breathing, person.
You sit down beside him, shotgun across your lap, as he slowly lowers his head onto yours. You have to imagine this is an upgrade from being used as an armrest considering you're only 5’10. Never before has another man made you feel so big, and yet so small at the same time. He curls up beside you almost instinctively as if he’s attempting to silently thank you for upholding the job you do, being “the man of the house”. His eyes say “I know this isn't easy” without him having to open his mouth.
The room is silent. Your hand rests on his thigh, and you ask yourself why you thought anything you've ever experienced could ever be compared to the end of the world, because this was it. This was the end. You think about buzzing your hair. You decide that if this is what being a man is, you don't mind being one conditionally when the situation calls for it.
You're not sure when it happened but it feels as though your final standing guest has gotten awfully comfortable invading your space. He's more demanding than he should have the right to be, asking you to order cigarettes, and beer, as if he has the right to be demanding anything, but you cave in every time. How could you say no?
You can't say no when he asks for cigarettes, and you can't say no when he asks for beer, and you can't say no when he asks to sleep in your father's bed tonight so he can stretch his legs. The idea of not providing, makes your stomach twist into new never before seen shapes.
There's something in his eyes that beg for attention in the glowing TV light of your father's bedroom. You reach a hand out to thumb through his hair. There's a pause where there shouldn't be one, and before you know it you press your lips against the top of his head. There's no moment of truth, there is no big acknowledgement, you feel like you slipped right into the position the universe had in mind at your creation. That's how the world ends, not with a bang, but with the quiet breathing of a man consumed by your arms. The world was finally over.
You think you might grow out your hair.