Somehow the dust never scattered when I exhaled onto the photograph. It was as though of age refused to detach itself from your and my smiling faces, frozen in a 24th of a second. It wasn’t a great photo, by any half-baked photographer’s standard. But if was a photo of you, the only I had. The only I could find where your figure had been aged into nothing more than a white silhouette.
There were no letters you’d written my mother, there were no books whose front page had your name written into a corner. There probably wasn’t even a coin which you’d touched left in this house. It was as though you’d never even existed. At least, the lack of objects holding any connection to you spoke that story. But the words my mother uttered softly to me after you disappeared, the stories which hovered over the coffee table on April afternoons, the recounts which filled the space on your hollow birthdays…they sung the soft tune of your existence.
My mother told me of how you’d always been so successful, how you’d worked so hard in your business, kept us financially stable in the unpredictable seas of time. In my eyes, you were what people sometimes call perfect. The way my mother spoke of you, the way her words would spread through my mind and stain my memory made every drop of blood in my body wish I could match up to you.
Your dedication, perseverance, diligence. You embodied everything I wanted to be. I’d work harder. At school, extra-curricular activities, in the future my work. I’d work hard, just like you had.
Nighttime became sleepless, with every part of my logical side screaming to sleep, but the fire of wanting to live up to you burned though it like paper. Afternoons grew out of being time to spend outside with peers, into the hours I’d spend alone in the piano room, the same tunes filling my head on repeat. School time had me flying ahead of the curriculum, and while others chattered and enjoyed idle conversation with their desk mates, my goal was not to waste time. This was to be like you. Anything to be like you.
Time morphed from a tool into a hinderance, my human limitations the bane of my existence. Why can’t I just be like you?
I wish I could remember you from the year preceding your vanishing. It’s as though you’d been completely erased from my memory, and maybe you had. I wish I could’ve asked you what I could’ve done to be like you. To be better. The idea of searching you up had flown in and out of my mind throughout my life, though every time it did the idea left my mind faster than the last.
But today those fears of defeat seem lifted. Or maybe they’ve completely crushed me. Either way, my fingers trace the edge of my laptop, my hand hovering over the keyboard.
I type in your name.
My screen lights up and a mixture of confusion, fear and disregard of what i see surge though me, twisted into a rope with stops my blood flow. I double-check the spelling. Its right. I reload the page. Command R. Command R. Command R. The same articles flash across the screen.
This is wrong.
It has to be wrong.
The stories.
The photograph.
All of it.
it’s not you. This is not you. This has to be someone with the same name. You’re not this.
My father is not a criminal.
Right?
Miosis overtakes my pupils and my expression falls far short of brushing its fingertips against the edge of the intensity of tangled emotions coiling inside me. This can’t be right. My mother - she wouldn’t lie to me right? And the photograph! That proves you weren’t a bad person right? I click onto one of the articles. Your name fills the header of the webpage. My eyes instinctively read the subtitle. Found guilty of assault and attempted ******. I laugh, the kind of laugh that fills the room when you’re sure of something’s inaccuracy or irrelevancy. But I know it’s empty.
This doesn’t make any sense. But it has to. The images of the person staring through the screen with the look of burning ice bare unsettling resemblance to the man in the dust-coated photograph. This is you.
My twisted and knotted mix of burning shock, confusion and rage cools too fast, forcing it into a brittle state. the smile I wear feels cold on my face, and hollow. It kind of makes sense. At least, it explains the previously questionable, yet still unquestioned, disappearance of you from us only weeks following your disappearance. And why the few memories I have of my third year consisted mainly of yelling and aggressive shadows in the living room on the nights I awoke to find a glass of water. And why somehow all of the family photos we’d stored carefully away had aged, and somehow only on the places you’d been.
But…still.
It doesn’t explain the words spoken of you so delicately one would mistake them for the glassy surface of undisturbed water in the mornings where the world was still asleep…ah. My eyes catch a string of words which have been italicized.
‘I’m still terrified of speaking ill of him. I know he’s being kept far, far away from us, but not a single negative word of him can be heard in my house, in fear of what could happen to us. I know it’s paranoid, but I suppose it also stops my child from having to live in fear of their father…”
A quote from my mother.
Thoughts flood my mind, overflowing my skull so my brain cant think. Memories of the air in the house tasting bitter, stained with the scent of alcohol. Of how whenever I begged my parents to let my friends stay over for the night, dead refusal blew the thought aside. And of how you carried me home when I fell. Of how you taught me addition.
Which were you, really?
Were you the person who harmed others mercilessly, trying to pluck their life from them as though it were a leaf from a tree. Or the person who told me stories before I fell asleep? Or were they both parts of you, coexisting within you, just waiting for the point where one shattered the other into a million glittering shards.