Aftermath

Butterflies curled up and slept and you could not save them.

Winged brutality lighting phosphenes in the dancing ashes of the former sycamore, memories clinging to the bestial self. Let me tell you about the song of lonely houses sitting on the edge of a disaster, broken planks and a bit of neon flashing.. Welcome.. Welcome. You come back to the stare at the same empty window, it's reflections of a ghost living in the attic for too long. You don't come out of the attic for long and every time you come out, you step on broken vases and fresh flowers gone dull. You look at the brown marigold dipped in the crimson of dried blood. Come back to me. The attic is calling and you take another step and the voice is no more. We are like broken mangled pieces of ourselves kept to our desiccated hearts. We are entombed in our own passions and our graves a feet away from us, embraces as cold as the sunlight that fails to warm us.

Somedays a song filters through to your attic. A ballad about lost lovers who killed each other. You scoff and continue playing your violin and add your own stanzas of how they haunt each other through eternity. Your smile becomes as sad as the house that you live in. You haven’t hated yourself any less and yet the desire to be loved clutches at your dead empty little heart. You catch the armrest and weep. Its an everyday thing now. The wooden house creaks and sways. Its an old thing with no sympathy. It just laughs at you. You hate the house. The house hates you. But you don’t leave. You both have learned to live with each other. Two desolate elements of the cosmos making for an empty symphony sung to the tunes of your rusty violin. You both complete each other. In your hatred. In your loneliness.

On the third day after my funeral, you came up to me and asked for forgiveness, my hands locked like the winds trapped in my windpipe, yearning for freedom, for a little bit of less pain. I wish I could kiss you with my desiccated eyes and ask you if you were okay even though I knew you weren’t. Its been long, hasn’t it? But all I could do was stare at you, and all you could was shed a few tears, water these dry bodies.

People talk about homes and you talk about the silence residing in those slow drips of water and the stale cheese rotting in the fridge. The chessboard gathering dust still has pawns locked in stalemate. Sometimes we want things to stay the same forever and then they stay the same for too long and we don’t know what to do with them. You wanted forever. You liked things to stay the same. You wanted me to stay the same. Wasn’t love enough? It never is. You cut down the sycamore because you liked it leafless and it had become as green as the love that blossomed here once. Now all you have the shadows. Former shades of existence that you still revel in. Change never waited for anybody, nor did death.

I loved you. Ashley loved you. Marie loved you. Now we all are dead. Couldn’t it be okay that you loved us back? Sometimes all we can commit a crime is grow up. Once you gave each of us a daisy and told us that it was the symbol of the love of a father for her daughters. “Daisies for my butterflies. "The daisy withered away and so did the love between us.

It was the summer of 1989 and I kissed a man. He smelt of smoke and a tad bit loneliness. I liked him because he reminded me of you. Somedays I loved him. The days he was not you. How much I looked for you and how often did I run away from you. You were there. Yet you felt like emptiness. You felt like a pond that had forgotten to breathe. You felt like a tree whose leaves did not stir in the wind. You felt like mother in the grave. You felt like all the things I loved and that didn’t love me back. You were there and you weren’t.

Its said people don’t come back from war. You didn’t either. You hugged us when you came back. We hugged you back. Later on, that’s all I could think about. How sometimes we hug each other and it becomes all that we can’t say. Mom was already sick by then. You looked at us and I knew you blamed us for Mom’s condition. It was completely illogical. We could not understand it. Yet you blamed us. Mom died and the man supposed to be there with her in the last moments was busy trying to talk to shadows. We waited for you to come into the house and see her for the last time. You didn’t.

We buried her in the plot where she had wanted to plant daisies. It was okay. She got her daisies after all blooming from her. All she was and all she wanted to be seemed to be a flower.

Three days later you came back naked and asked for a cup of coffee. Ashley brought you coffee and you hit her with the hammer you had in your hand because the coffee was too bitter. A month later you caught Marie with another girl and it was all we could do to stop you from killing her. For me, I wanted to disappear from your eyes. From this house. You caught me watering the daisies once and bent down to water them with me. I saw you then. All the love that I never felt for you those days, I felt in that moment. However I saw you burning all the daisies, the next day. We burn things sometimes and sometimes they burn us. For you it seemed both.

When those men came to rape us, you weren’t there. You were busy drinking somewhere. We screamed for you, Dad. Those men told us, you weren’t gonna come and save us. We believed them. It was hard not to. They beat us and all we could do was look away from them, hoping that the next blow won’t come. It did.

You came a day later. We had already died from our wounds by then. I saw you. I knew you were sorry. That’s when you finally came back to us. Your butterflies had curled up and slept already. You couldn’t save them.

Sometimes broken comes to us. Sometimes you are a shade of lost and no one finds you. Some day the coffee mug sits for too long and it smells like your anger. Somedays, we become the broken and somedays we break others. You carry happiness in you and yet you can’t colour your life. Some days you just fade away. Its okay.

Hey Dad, I love you. I don’t say I blame you but I understand. It hurts but I understand. It hurts more to see you this way. Come back to the world. Don’t be a shade of lost. Paint some shades of butterflies and a shade of our mother. She loved you. Plant some more sycamore and name them after us. And yes,

Plant some daisies for us, would you?

We love you.