There’s the matter of your crimes; those that you’ve committed and those that have been done to you. Crimes of rage, crimes of passion, crimes of innocence. Crimes so giant they stole you and you couldn’t sleep, couldn’t forget, couldn’t think.
The damage, the danger, lies in who you choose to convict.
When I was a girl my father gave me some advice that has turned over in my mind ever since.
“Cast out the devils and the angels go, too.”
He wasn’t a practicing Catholic. Three days before his sixty-eighth birthday, Frank Oakley put on his coat and hat and walked out the front door. He never returned.
Silence is a powerful conversational gambit.
...
“Are you cold?”
I am startled by the voice. I look down at my arm and see goosebumps. My boyfriend, Andrew is sitting across the table from me. He takes my hand. He knows the look on my face. I am lost, troubled, elsewhere.
"I'm okay," I tell him.
I can feel the cold Toronto wind, even though it’s May, swinging through the front door. It’s Sunday and full of families with loud children. The walls buzz, plates and cutlery bang. These are the sounds of people belonging. With it’s yellow walls and cracked tiles, this diner is a place of worship. For me, there is no prayer. Just confession.
“Did you hear me?” he asks.
“Sort of.”
I’m lost in this moment, drowning in air. My skin moves around the bones it protects like plastic in the wind. It was a sleepless night.
I stumbled the four steps to get here, just up the street from my parents house. Well, it was my parent’s house once. It then became a house split in two; my mother on top, my father on bottom, a flight of stairs acting like an invisible barrier separating the two.
“You’re beautiful,” Andrew tells me.
I am, sometimes. A natural beauty punctuated by fierce determination, that’s what my father always said.
I have long, blonde hair and when I’ve showered it turns into curls that fall down my back like a muscle. I have thick eyebrows and dark eyes that I line, winging at the tips. I wear red lipstick which makes kissing difficult, but I like to see my mark on men when I’m done. My skin is white as a sheet of paper. I never tan, even when I try. I am like an oil painting, colours permanent.
“Did you hear me?” Andrew asks.
He just came inside me. Twenty minutes ago in my mother’s bathroom floor. Afterwards, he collapsed, kissing me, and I became hysterical. Looking at him now, I feel sad.
I’m killing us, setting fire to what we were. I could warn him, but I’m an arsonist. Being loved by me is like drinking slow-acting poison. When your lungs explode, you’re not going to know what hit you. He’ll wake up dead, surprised he’s burnt to a crisp.
He’s growing his hair longer for style because he’s a movie-star. Well, not yet. He’s an actor, a working one, and he’s too handsome to be unknown for much longer. He has dark, moist looks. Jet black hair and olive skin. People always ask him what his ethnicity is. I tell you what he is; lucky, born under a star. Women look at him on the street. Waitresses get nervous talking his order. He walks heavy through the air and it shakes the space around him.
I move closer to him like cold hands to fire. I have a naked thought and I go with it because I’m fighting. I’m fighting to remember, to go back to who I was before all this happened. He doesn’t believe it, but I am fighting. I don’t want us dead, not when had such high hopes that I was different with him.
“It’s weird that people don’t take pictures at funerals.”
“Why?”
“You take pictures at every other memorable event. Weddings, birthdays, parties.”
“Those are happy.”
“Not always. Funerals aren’t always sad.”
With the fashionable hair he looks too much like my brother, Matthew. My brother's hair was a bone of contention between he and my father. They had so many they could have constructed an army of skeletons.
Matthew looks like my father did; a tall, ginger-haired Irishman. I found that unfortunate that they looked so alike when my father hated him the moment he laid eyes on him. I get my looks from my mother. Unconsciously, even though my father grew to hate her, too, that was why he loved me best.
“You remind me of my brother,” I tell Andrew.
“Your brother’s in jail.”
“No, he’s not.”
“I was kidding. I love you.”
“He’s not in jail. He’s just a vagrant.”
“I know. I love you.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Do you promise?”
He nods.
“I feel vulnerable,” I tell him. My ability to love men is unparalleled. A woman so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.
“I blame Los Angeles.”
“We’re not in Los Angeles anymore.”
“Okay, then I blame everything else.”
...
My father was prone to apparitions, projections of his hopefully troubled conscience.
In lieu of recent events, I have to wonder if death appeared before him as a faceless man. Was he lost in a dance of circumnavigation? Death went left, so he went right? Could he speak to death? Did they shoot the shit? What do you say to your poltergiest, the man that threw him from alive to finally dead?
The joke is that I became the very thing I was most vehement against. Overnight. The moment my father died, I too became prone to apparitions. Psychic flashes. Leading feelings. 'Bullshit!’ that I never gave him the satisfaction of believing. Well, until it happened to me.
How much stock do you put in yourself?
I am my dead father’s captive. Obsessions are like ghosts; a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling. Or, with profits, obsession can be a compelling motivation. Obsessions, like ghosts, don’t die a natural death.
They linger.
But then, everything gets warped in definition.
No comments:
Post a Comment