One sunny day when I was 10 - the flowers in full bloom - my father tried to shoot himself, upstairs in his locked room.
Except it wasn’t a sunny day. It was an ordinary night - a night I watched from the neighbor’s window a police officer smash through the glass doors of my childhood home - a night three days before my first family visit to a psychiatric hospital - a night filled with my mother’s tears, my confusion, shattered glass, and gunshots.
No, not a sunny day, but get it? HAHA - misdirection. HAHA - juxtaposition. HAHA - I’m describing the opposite of a happy, sunny day. HAHA.
I cope with the sadness by mixing it with jokes, like how you may cope with having to eat a dead crow by dipping it in chocolate - doesn’t help, does it, you sick *******?
My father has the sadness. He tried to cure it with a shotgun.
His father has the sadness. He drinks. I wish I had a fun way to tell his story, but that's mostly it. He wakes up early, puts on his best old-man clothes, and sits in his basement watching old Westerns and he drinks.
I don't know why he gets up early. I don't know why he gets dressed. I think it's for the same reason I write - same reason I run - I think alcohol helps him swallow that bird - you sick ******* - I think he had the same fear when he had his first son: that he'd pass on the sadness.
He did. His son did. Was it passed though their genes or through something they’d seen?
That question terrifies me, because I hold my daughter with my left arm - an arm covered in scars which clearly read:
“Your dadda has the sadness.” “Your dadda’s not well.” “You dadda lost every fight with himself except one” - and that’s ongoing.
He’s losing.
I fear the day she may write about some sunny day when she was 10.