The kid, a family and the affair

I walked with my head hung low. I could not stand up to the interrogations by my father. It was after all my mother’s friend. He had come to our house. I couldn’t stop him. I could not bang the door on him. I had no rights to throw him out of my mother’s house. My father asked me again, “how can you not ask him not to come back? How can you laugh and make conversation with him? Do you not care about how I feel? Do you not care about me?”

He spoke well. He spoke well to my mother. He was took her out for lunch, dinner or just a long drive out of her home. With him she was herself. She was just her. She did not have a daughter she needed to tend to. She was not a mother. She was just another woman. He was her break from the world. He was her way of having the fun she deserved in her life for love had failed her and she had failed the test of love.

I shuttled between my father’s house and my mom’s house. I faced the same music every single time. I was asked the same questions. I was told the same things.

“You don’t understand how pure and unassuming our love was…”

“Your mother and I were completely in love with each other. I don’t know what went wrong.”

“Everything was going fine. But we split up a year after you were born.”

“If it were not for you I would have told your mom to fuck off I would have been happily married to another woman by now.”

“People wondered how I got such a beautiful woman to marry me. They wished us to be miserable.”

“It is up to you to make us get back together. You can make all the difference. How will you get married otherwise? How will any guy’s parents want to get their son married to a family like ours?”

I was no superwoman. I did not even have the strength to look any person in the eye or pose for a solo picture. Neither did I have guts to tell my dad that I cant do what he wants me to nor did I in actual have the balls to tell my mother what he wanted me to. I wanted the only problems in life to be who took my pencils, how much I need to get to be the first in class and what I did or did not want to have for dinner. I did not want to know the terms of my parents divorce. I did not want to hear about the blame game that grown-ups so love to play but I was forced to hear all of that and more. I did not want to know. I wanted to be left alone.

I am alone now. I have grown up. I am not being asked the questions I was so used to hear. I have become a detached sentimentalist. I couldn’t care less about what people want me to do or want off me but I cannot stop from being depressed blaming myself. I think it’s a deadly combination. I am upset and so is the other person. I feel I am not answerable to anybody and for anything that I do.

I got older and so did my parents. He did not mean anything to my father anymore. Neither did he mean anything to my mother. They lay on their death beds filled with unfulfilled dreams, humiliated with the decisions they made in their life, they wondered how I became a person with no heart and soul for them. How I had only feelings for the people I thought I cared for. If they had nothing to give, I left. I left and as I walked away, with no remorse of their impending death, they asked me,

“How and when did you stop caring for us?”

He bought me chocolates. He bought me ice cream. He was showered me with the love I would I wanted my dad to give me. A child knows only tangible things. Love was a two-way street. He touched me. I couldn’t tell.

“How did you let life happen to me?”