Crutches

10:09 PM, the last night of summer, I have become frustrated with my wife for what she told him. I hold it inside.

“Sit down, and shut the hell up! We’ve raised a monster of a child.” Sydney grumbles under his breath when hearing this, head down. “You’ll finish your food!”

His head propped up at me; eyes glistened of regret from something he was uncertain of whether or not he had actually done. His eyes are impeccably green.

I look away to my wife.

10:10 PM, the last night we ate dinner being able to tolerate one another, and I begin to think to myself in this awkward and unstable quietness:

What kind of a monster was he for not knowing what lied between black and white? He did not understand gray, but she made him wear it like a revealing patch sewed onto his heart, suffocating the rhythm of his livelihood.

All he knew was the pain that would come afterwards, the countless lectures, relentless scolding, but for what?

Why I think my wife is acting like a narcissistic, disconnected, pompous ass:

She talks to me about buying a convertible while Sydney struggles to open the front door to the house in the background.

What I see in Sydney’s eyes:

There is a reflection of my shame in that incandescent silence, and how he cried for me, through those bottomless pools of green iris, swirling about my existence, drowning me, waking me. “Please, please, wake up for me.”

One of the only memories I have of my reclusive father who left me to figure much for myself:

I use to run with him. Everywhere.

10:11-10:19 PM, still this very same night stuck in my head as Autumn begins to unravel, I listen to it all as he works his way up the stairwell.

Sydney manages to thrust himself from leaning on one crouch onto the other as legs dangle and swing in every direction like hanging corpses, and after several stumbles and loud thumps and clings of metal crouches hitting against the railing, he reaches his room.

What follows that moment:

Silence again. I can feel his glare piercing through the walls of our home and breaking through me. I am a hollow shell.

10:25 PM, same damn night, my wife and I in bed. I break:

“I know this is what he needs, but his mind is sick with the pain, literally swollen, and all you can do is act normal? Insanity is building up inside of him, and I’m going to do the job of showing his anger.”

My wife’s reaction immediately after:

She looked up from the book she was reading, smirked at me, looked back into the literature.

“What a fucking joke,” she uttered. I am a hollow shell.

I sleep on the couch.

10:26 PM, a gutless man lays half-awake and alone on his side, in the fetal position. That man is me. What I dream about:

I am in a heavily lit room thickened by a musty scent of rotting flesh. The room is enclosed, and there are no curtains to shade me from exposure. I take a look at my watch, and the date written above the time instantly sends a shiver through my spine. Today is my son’s birthday, and I’m missing it entrapped in my mind. Now the scent magnifies, and its pungency lingers in my nostrils, my brain refusing to recognize its familiarity. I am terrified to look below, and there they are. Twisted and crunched towards my body, one longer than the other: a pair of decaying useless limbs.

I want to swim under the endless green, but instead I am just defecating myself.

What I realize when I awake:

I have actually soiled myself.

What actually happened to Sydney somewhere along the way:

He was thrashed by a landscaping truck on a busy street near his high school.

What I imagine happening:

I am the driver, I am his crippled legs, I am an eternal sense of crookedness haunting him forever after.

6:07 AM, August 27, the echoing of the alarm sears into me, and I wait that relieving feeling that I have just sobered from the disorientation of a dream. What I feel instead:

My legs are numb.

8:09 AM, August 27, what Sydney is doing on his first day of school:

Waiting in the OR lobby for his 8:15 surgery.

What my mother said to me on a day that Sydney was recovering from the accident:

“You’re so reckless, Henry. Sydney will be fine, just stand near him when he needs you. You remind me of when you were in high school.”

8:11 AM, August 27, Sydney and I wait together, and he does what I should have done for him long before:

Grab my sleeve and say, “I’m scared.”

A letter I would write to my adolescent self:

To the desk of a time bomb of contradictions that will lead to helpless confusion,

I am confident you’re uncertain with yourself at this very moment, but do not exhaust yourself by blindly running the unending circuit in your mind. Unfreeze yourself. You ache for the discovery and for the serendipity of opportunity to expel you from your incessant displeasure of what you’re becoming. This is no waiting game. You have privilege before you, now opt to decision, and do not cripple yourself with the immensity of what the future holds. And be intuitive, not brash and impetuous, for buried underneath such a senseless act of impulsiveness is the hastiness to skip or dismiss all the transitions in life.

You have a child to take care of now. If you settle for less of what you’re granted to become, the love you carry with you will be frail, useless, pathetic, a PhD that hangs on the office wall of your mind only to impress sporadic visitors, and true compassion arises only from those who can endure and gain something from it. You will not be a shallow statue in the endless garden of what is seemingly alright, but is essentially conformity. This is not conformity. Necessity. Step out of your mind and find what may in fact be perpetually grateful for the voice you contribute in the unbearable heat of cruel silence.

Swim the green, do not forget to breathe.

Sincerely,

A cracked man who found nothing in himself, but a symbiotic and unconditional nature shared with his son.

8:13 AM, the first day of school for Sydney, he is having open surgery on his brain; I think of my wife, an impulsive decision I made when I was younger, and think of why I married her:

She didn’t know me very well at all.

8:19 AM, I am watching Dr. Cassidy prep my son for surgery as I stand from above in the concealed observatory, and I am back in my head, but I think differently, think of my dead father:

I use to run with him everywhere.