I just went back to the house one more time. I told myself it was to check-in with the various handymen and painters and to make sure that there wasn’t anything I wanted to take with me last minute. I know the real reason is because I just wanted to see it one more time.
After all those years away, I just needed to be in those rooms one more time. I try to forget the happy times, but there were definitely happy times. Kids normalize things, right? Kids have to learn they’re having a bad childhood as they grow older, no matter how ugly it would be to anyone else, their private hell is the only world they’ve ever known. We had moments together when we laughed and played and delighted in the world. Maybe not with Mom or Dad so much, but with each other. I never went back after you died. Literally. When we all left the hospital that night I said I was going over to Debbie’s house and got on the first bus leaving town. I’d already brought all my cash with me, what little I’d saved working my junior year. I just had a feeling, when we heard you’d been in a car accident, that the worst was true.
I came back when Mom died. The house goes to me, and I need the money. If there is an outside chance that there is still something left after the sale of the house pays off their debts… anyway, I need the money.
I didn’t expect to come by the cemetery, but then as I was leaving I saw that they’re painting over our old room. I mean, of course they are. They aren’t going to sell the house covered with our old pencil graffiti and scratch marks. I just wish I didn’t see them doing it.
I try not to think about you much. Still, I know you’re in there, deep down in the darker places in my brain. Not the bad memories, most of those are because of Dad. It’s the good ones with you I try to forget, those are the ones that hurt the most. But seeing them paint over all the secret jokes and codes we left there, the signs of what we meant to each other, that was just too much, to actually see them doing it with my own eyes. I wanted to scream at them, to tell them to get the fuck out. Of course, that wouldn’t have made any sense. I guess resisting that urge is what keeps me from being a crazy person like Dad was.
I guess, as they paint over our walls, I should feel like we are being covered over like a secret, like a hidden treasure. Little will the new tenant know that underneath the paint in their new home our script is there, a chronology of the joys and pains, triumphs and abuses of two little boys they’ll never know existed.
I should feel that way, but I don’t. I feel like they’re erasing us. Deleting everything we went through and had. I feel like they’re accomplishing what I’ve been trying to accomplish all these years since you died.
Anyway, I have to catch a plane. I just thought you should know. They’re painting over our old room. And I miss you.
trigger fiction. 