Like Father Like Son

Everything had changed; I don't see the city around me anymore - I walk past but don't see anything. Worlds fell apart and yet nothing changed, in the end a little individual cannot be see when looking at 'the big picture'. When taking dazed wobbly strides along dust littered concrete, the metallic chariots whizzed past without being noticed despite their droning thunder. They're just colourless blurs - reminders. Since the day of his death two years had passed, and now the world around me looks darker – the days feel longer but life seems shorter. Tears, wails, and isolation is what follows from mother after the delivery of bad news – but to begin with, she refused to believe it true. At inhuman speeds she evaded the policemen and glided through the air over the threshold before dashing down the same path I now walk – towards the crash site. To be able to navigate with pools clouding one's eyes and waterfalls spilling down their face is a miracle. Yet, no amount of clouding or haze could distort the horror that met her like a hit to the head.

At the young age I was, I foolishly went after her – recklessness, rebellion, childishness; what else would one expect of a teen, especially one in grief. With age comes wisdom and at that time I did not understand my own feelings; the fear - washing over every grain of common sense like a monstrous wave - of losing someone else that day became too real. A child grew up within a minute, and that same man gave up in the next. Blood painted and gore stained on the city street corner with crowds of muttering mannequins nudging one another for a single look. Over the shouts of police and gossip of bystanders, how could anyone see the boy feeling as if he was falling to the darkest pit – when in reality he had fallen to his knees in the gore of his own father and sobbed. Some heard the cry of a child begging for their father, but shook it off for a brat separated for its parent.

Police eventually hauled my dirty quivering form from the ground, ignoring my protests and pleas, and removed me; escorting myself and my mother back to our house, as it no longer was my home – not without all my family living there anymore. After what felt to be dragged on days of questioning and interrogation, police presence vacated the premises and left the house to be drowned in waves of frozen stillness. Silence was its companion and it swallowed the entire house, taking me with it.

Maybe he didn't know what he was doing

Maybe it was a mistake

Maybe he didn't know what he was doing

Why was it a left that he would take?

Time passed but not much changed. Time also meant the opportunity to think and my mother would not allow herself to remember him, all her time was devoted to my younger siblings – they were far too young to understand why he wouldn't be coming home anymore. I myself couldn't even look at them; I would look for him to walk in the door from a hard day at work and they would run into his arms, I'd be there to ask again if there was a position available for me to fill one day soon. My own family has become nothing but heartbreaking reminders of what I once had and have lost. And it has been two years of loneliness, two years of mourning; two years of living as a corpse. I no longer feel a purpose within me; there is nothing I now hope for or look forward to, nothing that can make me smile the same way. I no longer feel at all. My father's brain didn't tell him it was a left turn day, but mine did.

I waited till I heard it coming, waited till I saw my father beckoning to me from the other side of the road. I knew it was a left turn day; I had actually planned it for a while. I took the left turn at the corner and stepped off in front of the metallic grim reaper.

We all have left turn days;

Mine is over and done,

We all have left turn days;

Like father like son.