Cavity

You should be grateful, they said. Women your mother’s age would have chosen to remarry, they said. You should do all you can to live a life of gratitude to her, they said. She chose to keep raising you despite your father dying so young, they said.

Your mind was full of the words of advice that were pelted at you in the wake of your father’s death as you walked through your neighborhood as was your custom on evenings like this; when the darkness in your house was a little more solid than usual. You could feel it alongside a fear that permeated the air. It was a fear that caused more fear because it was a fear that you could not name.

You kept walking as if to evade the question of why you were afraid. Home was simply a little dark this evening. You wondered if your father felt this fear too as you approached a spot you used to sit on with your father when you both took strolls on cool evenings like this.

You found yourself working through a few maybes. Maybe your father felt the fear, too. Maybe that was why he took those endless strolls. Or maybe there were just more sights to see: the blue sky, your neighbors’ backyards, stray animals conducting what you considered evening visits to the old grandmas compassionate enough to throw them leftovers, electric poles with wires stretching overhead.

You took in the several backyards that faced you; the untold stories of the families that lived in them permeating the air like the fear you ran away from back home. You crouched and then took a bit of sand in your hands. You contemplated lying on the ground then decided against it. You did not want to soil your clothes. They were rather tough to clean. Your father always had his tough clothes washed by a dry cleaner in town. It still shocked you that the weekends passed without you hearing his voice. You still found yourself expecting him to walk in with a bag of clean laundry.

You wondered if your mother expected this too.

You heard your mother call for you, her voice carrying from your house and spreading through the wind like powder. You let her voice fall to the ground. You did not dignify her call for you with a response. You kept imagining instead.

In a part of your consciousness that you liked to pretend did not exist, your father came back from the dead. There had been a terrible mistake and he almost did not survive, but he was not dead. Somebody else’s father was. And in that part of your imagination, you were grateful that your father did not die. Somebody else had to live a life of gratitude to their only parent for choosing them by not marrying someone else, but that person was not you.

You saw your father walk home with a bag of clean laundry. You saw him sit on the sofa. You saw your mother bring him food and join him there. You made small talk with him. You saw the darkness and fear that had you hanging on to this stroll like a lifeline morph into the exact time he returned home from work on the days he was able to.

And then, you wondered what would happen if you went home and told your mother.

If you said “Mother, I get really scared around 6:30 pm because I cannot bear it that Father would not walk through the door.”

You also wondered if that would only compound your mother’s grief. You wondered what purpose it would serve?

You kept wondering and letting the sand run through your fingers as you drew countless unintelligible patterns on the soil.

You heard your neighbourhood erupt, “Up nepa!” They had restored the power.

You stood up to your feet and let your muscles relax. They were a little cramped from your squatting on the same spot for so long. The evening air was crisp and fresh with the smell of a dozen dinners.

Yellow light bulbs glimmered in the distance, enhanced by a progressively darkening sky. It was time to leave your father’s spot and go home.

The next time the fear and the dark spread, and you felt an overwhelming urge to take a stroll, you resolved that you would find a quiet corner in your house instead. Hunched within the viscous stickiness of your fear, you would say the thing that it really was out loud,

“God. I really miss my dad.”