This was a short writing assignment for my creative writing class in Fall 2019.
This was the room where she lived.
Where she laughed, where she cried, where she studied for her calculus test, where I grounded her for failing. Maybe it was my high expectations that led to this situation. I can’t know; she won’t talk to me now.
Sometimes I come in here and look around. She used to yell at me and slam the door. When she was younger, she invited me to toy tea parties. I declined; I was busy. I shouldn’t have been busy, she was much more important than whatever I had on my mind. She was not on my mind. Now, the moment is gone.
I don’t know exactly why I came back here. I want her voice to propel me out, for the door frame to shake with force. I want to laugh over afternoon tea with a teddy bear. I want to talk with her.
I’m still here. The light has angled itself deeper into the dark crevices of the room, casting the furniture in orange glow. Cicadas declare that it is summer, their cries muted by the window pane. Leaning on the window is a polaroid. I remember the day. I bought her a birthday camera and she was so excited to use it. She was wearing a paper birthday crown, my princess. Her frozen vibrant smile makes me feel like a king. She didn’t smile often around me, but I saw her from a distance sometimes, talking with friends, laughing at a joke that I couldn’t hear. The day of her birthday, she hugged me. I kept my arms at my side like a tin man.
Someone pounds up the stairs. It’s not her. It’s the dog, pleading with me. He talks with soulful brown eyes. She loved the dog, and cried when she couldn’t bring him to the dorm. He was her best friend when we lived on the farm. Puppy and girl, brimming with youth. Now, the dog is half past ten, ticking every closer to death. He whines. Someday, I will treasure this moment, however mundane. Someday, the dog bowl will ride away with the Monday garbage men, and my garden will have a sad new marker. Someday, I’ll wish I had someone to feed in this cold, empty house. I’m not busy, so I feed the dog.
I’ve been alone before. The summer before last. She said she wanted money; I think she wanted distance. The lonely drive back from camp was maddening. The echo of cavernous rooms was worse. Every thought bounced off the walls ten times louder until I went deaf from thinking. I was hungry for voices, so I feasted on her return. A squabble duet, filling the room with the harmonious argument that I craved. A thunderous door and a raincloud of guilt. I was satiated.
Every day, I return to this room. It is my pilgrimage. I pace seven times around the room, and baptize myself with silent tears. My prayers are never granted. Every day, she left early in the morning to go to church. I did not approve; I am not religious. But maybe I’m on her mind. I dismissed her faith as petty rebellion, but maybe I’m in her prayers. Maybe I exist as a spirit in her brain, haunting cobweb-filled hallways of dreams. Or maybe I loom ominously overhead as a monument, like that of Buddha or of Hitler, casting a shadow on every action.
She doesn’t talk to me anymore. She wouldn’t even take my money to pay for college. Her telephone doesn’t work. I drove to her school once; they wouldn’t talk to me. I want to know. I miss her, even if I may have seemed to her as angry or controlling or distant and busy, and I want to talk to her because I am her father, and she is my daughter, my daughter who doesn’t talk to me anymore.
