We sit around my aunts brown kitchen table
A scene we’ve done a thousand times before where I slinked unnoticed behind my hair until it was turn to recite my yearly accomplishments.
Back into the shadows.
This time is different.
This time my father is dead.
Suicide.
He went missing 24 hours before.
“Your fathers illness took him”
He was diagnosed with a neurological disease months prior.
We never spoke.
No it didn’t, my brain screamed.
Suicide.
I run to the kitchen in panic trying to find clonizapam which I almost never take cause I’m afraid of pills.
“What are you taking, doing drugs won’t numb your pain”.
He’s a cop, of course anxiety meds would be seen as “drug addiction”.
“I’m having a panic attack” I muster, angrily from the displaced shame.
I don’t take the pill out of spite and we don’t say anything on the 30 minute drive to his house.
I’m probably sheet white, I feel anxious.
I feel nothing.
I haven’t cried.
We had a terrible relationship, dad and I.
Terrible.
Suicide.
Hours pass.
Minutes?
I dunno, I’m dissociating into everyone’s grief.
Stop talking to me.
I don’t want to be here.  
So many unanswered questions, ones I still don’t know nearly a year later.
Silence and awkwardness.
I sit at the head of their table and avoid everyone’s eyes except my little brothers.
They’re all staring at me, finally paying attention to me after so long.
I hate it.
I want to disappear, their eyes like pathetic little daggers of sadness.
Why the **** am I here?
Someone mentions my tattoos.
Yeah.
I have tattoos.
Tattooed hands, and a dead father.
I only cry when my brother does.
Telling him it’s a suicide, a face I’ll never forget and my soul left behind at the death of his innocence.
Nothing left to protect.
Our father is dead.
6 days till the year death anniversary.
I don’t cry as much as I had after the veil finally shattered.
I’ve never known depression like that; though I was able to find myself after severe heartache.
A traumatized youth.
C-ptsd.
Pass me the join, I need to sleep.