• • •
“My mother cries to sleep every night and I wonder if she is trying to fill the empty side of the bed with her tears. It doesn’t make a difference whether or not he was still here, in both situations, she drowns herself. I don’t think much of my father but Mom tells me that I am supposed to love him the way she is supposed to love her husband. I grew up with this idea that people can forgive shadows, feel sympathy for phantoms, respect men who never stay. I mean my father he still lives with me, but he’s never around. I only see him in his bouts of anger, when he calls thunder into the house and makes us feel his presence, feel the storm clouds that expand in his lungs. My mother sees it differently. She only sees him when he is soft, like the worn side of a slipper, he is tattered and solemn. She tells me he apologizes in his sleep but I don’t know how you can be sorry when your eyes are closed to your victims. I don’t know if he means it when he says he wants to love us again. Maybe it’s the way Mom says people are supposed to love. Just because I happen to have his blood, maybe he feels obligated to try again. But I don’t love that way. I don’t see people as permanent settings, just because I was born with them doesn’t mean I have to live with them. I don’t carry my father in my heart because I am supposed to. I threw him out the day he broke my chest open. He was the one who made it easy. But my mother still loves him because she think she is supposed to. I wonder if she knows he is not the same man she fell in love with. Maybe she does. Maybe that is why she cries.”
— The first men we are supposed to love
