It's okay to pretend

Find the familiar in the weather, the smell of blankets, shirts and pillows.

How is it that all the past was so dysfunctional? But, with you even with the insistence of space, waves and wires there is functionalism?

Tonight there was a strange recollection of the years that came to pass. A song that me and papa listened to on the way to school was playing. Replaying was that gray sadness when our home became a house. The awareness that as much as I had hoped, the past was going to remain unchanged. The unsettling feeling, that the future wont ever fix what was done. 

When dad was sick, mom cared for him and it was her love that brought him back to life.

First, I remember that I ran, I couldn't even look at him. The guilt that consumed. The guilt that I was his own daughter, made of the love that she had ruined.

When dad was sick, I cared for him, but love couldn't bring him back. A part of him, of me, and the entire family died, and it can't be brought back to life.

I'm ashamed that I can't grow past it, that even as I accept that nothing is going to change what was done, I can't grow past it. As far as my parents go, I'm afraid I will always be a child, begging them to love each other, begging. Still, I don't regret that I hope for the inconceivable. It's just an inferior feeling, to see all the other sons and daughters let go, while I am still a child wishing myself back into my playroom, back to family dinners, back to trick or treating, back to Christmas mornings, and back to the middle of the bed when these bad dreams wont give up.

And so I pretend, I do adult things, I smoke on the porch.

He says, "These last four years, I know they've been hard, but now it's time to get out of the desert and into the sun".. even if it's alone. What's left to lose? I've done enough, and if I fail, well then I fail, but I gave it a shot.