Class
“I was always such a child. When my father left, I didn’t know why he did so, I thought that it was all my mother’s fault so I cried for him. He would take me places, always with a can in his hand, and I would go with him, excited. I would share the things that I was proud of with him. he was my role model, I wanted to be smart just like him.” Bill looked up from his reading into the curious stares of his classmates. When he signed up for this class he hadn’t thought he’d have to read his poetry out loud. At least it was free range poetry, he was rubbish at everything else.
He swallowed dryly, continuing. “I found his browser history. I didn’t know what it meant, but the girls were beautiful and not my type. I went back on my website and forgot i ever saw anything. we had pizza. I’ve inherited that laptop and now that’s all I can think about when I tap out things on the keys or check the history.” This was painful, he decided. Reading his thoughts out loud. At least this piece wasn’t too apparent that he was writing about himself.
“Once we went through the grove in the park and sat in the trees among the homeless, you with another strong smelling can in your hand, and me with a dog leash. I had started figuring out what it was you were drinking. that day I tried to stop you from grabbing that can and instead tried to get you to grab a coke, but you yelled at me and bought it anyway. I cried.” He remembered the red hot shame of a child at not being able to protect his father against the evil of the liquid, about not understanding quite enough to see and addiction for what it was. At school they had taught him about alcohol abuse, but not quite enough. That night his mother had sat him down and told him about his father. He hadn’t believed her, and instead ran down the hall and slammed the door in her face. He’d cried that night too.
“Ever since I figured out that you left me for alcohol I hated you. Or at least, I thought I hated you. I hated how you lived and how beer took my father away from me. I thought that when you went to rehab after rehab that you had changed and that my father had come back. Each time I got my heart broken. I stopped thinking that.” He was angry. Angry at him for leaving him all alone, angry at the world, angry at himself. Feelings whipped inside of Bill’s mind, like a bit of a plastic bag in a hurricane. “You were in the hospital. People said you were dying. I didn’t care. I told myself that it was just like every other time someone said you were dying so I stayed out, camping under the ebony skies of the country. I went along to the hospital anyway and cried. You survived that day. That part was particularly painful to Bill. I shouldn’t have, he thought, put that in. The emotions of that day fresh in his mind. All of the family in town had squeezed into that small hospital room. He’d spent most of it staring at the shiny brown linoleum floor.
Bill ventured a look at his classmates who were all captured by his words. Some were nodding to what he has said, some looked quite sad, and some looked confused. “In the middle of the week we got a call. You had died. Eating cereal. That was, I thought to myself, a terrible way to die. I had spent all that time wishing you would leave me alone and now you’re gone and I find myself wishing that you were in fact here, annoying me and telling me about how smart you are or telling dad jokes. I find myself revealing how selfish I was instead of you. I find myself hating the person I’ve become more and more.” He glanced at his audience again, having gained back all of their attention. Many of them were staring at him with shock and horror written over their faces.
This is an apology. I just wanted to say that I’m sorry. Sorry for being this way, sorry that I know what alcohol tastes like when I’m drowning in it, sorry that I am intimate with the feel of the barrel of a gun against my temple, sorry for the barbed wire, sorry for that, sorry for this, sorry for the cathedrals I ruined and the monuments I set fire to, sorry for the deadbolt and the chain and the lock with no key.” Bill stopped, folded his work up into a tiny square, and shoved it in his pocket.
No one clapped.