I feel certain, to my core, that the day my father walked out on our family started like any other ordinary summer day.
***
The large wooden cube that served as an erstwhile planter box held nothing but the dried remains of a failed parental experiment in growing basil and oregano.
***
My mother hung her happiness on my father’s coat rack. When he moved out, taking his baggage with him, he left her alone in a very small, empty room.
***
The problem, however, comes when your self-perception forms from the cruelest lies a narcissist tells you to make himself feel better. All you have to form your happiness in that empty room are the things found in empty rooms. That is to say: dust, cobwebs, and fear. Sadness, anger, doubt, dispair, and darkness. Fragments of the fingernails you gnaw off during times of anxiety and loneliness, spitting them on the floor as though that were less distasteful than swallowing the shards. The resulting product is at once fragile, sticky, sharp, and useless. It may, to the untrained, outside eye, appear solid and irridescent, and it may appear strong enough to build a house, a life, an identity from it. But truth will out, as the saying goes, and the moment rain or tears or blood falls on the ephemeral, imaginary solidarity, irreparable holes form, their edges scortched and stiff like cigarette burns on old mustard-colored couches.
***
The universe does not stop spinning when we are knocked off-kilter by unexpected loss or lies, no matter how much we wish for that. Simply waking up, day after day after interminable day, garners us no sympathy or special treatment.
***
Amy distrusted him immediately; she did not appreciate tall, messy-haired strangers who, by way of introduction, state the obvious.
***
He gave a wry, sideways grin, like a Cheshire cat who’s been caught with his paw in the fishtank again.
***
He walked toward the exit doors, glancing back to see if Amy was watching him go. She knew, from many viewings of many romantic comedies, that he would do this.