Midnight and I've just fallen asleep despite the ache leaning against my ribcage and the booger running marathons in my nasal cavity...
Midnight and that still-too-strange ululation of the telephone, my carcass dragging across the cold floor to answer it.
A sweet voice on the other end, and all would have been sugar-spun clouds and leaning up against my polochon, back in my warm bed, friendly voices would have rocked me to even better dreams as they have so often done.
Instead, the shrill whine of panic in my father's voice all but shredded the comfortable tendrils woven about my somnolent mind, ten minutes of concentrated effort (despite the training I've had during my current stint in management) just to pull the handful of kernels of importance from his ranting.
Turns out there was nothing of urgency, nothing at all
He is just an old man screaming for attention
And I do not have the strength to give it to him.
This is broken, that is going haywire, your mother is a bitch, you're making a mistake about your car, your life, all of your decisions, moneymoneymoneymoney, there is never anything new, never any points to discuss, only a reiteration of hopelessness.
I left so many years ago to escape that hopelessness, the despair that steps on your throat and refuses to let you look forward.
His insistence that life can never be anything but pain.
In returning to them on little cat's feet, gingerly attempting to create contact, relations, there have been careful gifts exchanged back and forth, dinner here, help with computers there, a lift to the airport, pillows imported from Paris to match my mother's new bedspread.
Knees shivering from the skirt that I know will warm their hearts at my departure from torn jeans and heavy metal t-shirts, hair a colour that no longer appears in the candy-spectrum, I thought I was turning all the secret keys and undoing the cages my wild years had chased our relationship into.
But the despair is still in him, and he hands it to me with every word, every threat, every breath
Add it takes all my strength and dreams and take-joy-in-the-small-things moments to slip from the chains when the connection breaks.
Those chains that stretch even across an ocean.
Arn� rails at me sometimes that I have all the answers, solutions to all the little pangs and distresses.
Every day I tell him that there are a million more questions for every epiphany that he just hasn't had to ask them yet,
And here I am faced with one that all my improve-my-life plans and step-by-step procedures leave me empty-handed against.
How do I deal with a sixty-five year old man begging for attention?
How do I hand him flowers without suffering the slings of his paranoia, his manic-depressive determination that all good things are followed by catastrophes.
How do I tell him that I just want to know what a family is, that I don't want, don't need anything else? Not money, not gifts, not anything.
How do I accept the help he so desperately wants to offer to give him a feeling of accomplishment, without suddenly finding myself in debt again?
Where did this strict sentiment come from, and how to dissipate "I made you, you owe me" into the mature relationships I see blossoming around me?
But au moins I am asking the questions.
This means that the answers will come.
And for the moment, dreaming of David's wonderfully familiar hands in my hair and lips on my neck is enough to chase the horrifying edge in my fahter's voice away.
It is not a solution, but it clears some of the pain and lets me keep moving.