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.