Drywall
I still don't know who had faith in who. He, who held on for years through trying mental illness. She, who stayed in a crushing marriage long after all other family had left him. Often, it seemed she held a desperate belief in the temporary nature of humanity strong enough for the both of them. Mornings dragged on in an endless sea of sameness; they began as early as the devil's hour and fell forward in bouts of shouting, tears, spilled medication and frantic pacing. During particularly interesting weeks, nights ended in police sirens and the cold lights of the emergency room lobby. Life hit quiet spells after incidents like those. Groceries were purchased with untensed shoulders, cell phones remained silent, and we kids voluntarily came home earlier from sports, music lessons, and friend's homes. I still remember running through parking lots in sandals, refusing to enter my father's car, wondering whether whether this last scandal did or did not fall under the category of abuse, and whether or not I could trust that he was still there, still fighting-- I, for one, struggled to hold faith. In the aftermath of years of slow, staggered healing, our house filled with silence. The bloodstains on the textured drywall have long since washed off, but many of the dark spots, where hands and bodies passed over the same surface again and again and again in those wee morning hours, remain. Rarely is the past discussed, perhaps by nature of what faith we had in the future-- it was a hope grounded in nonstop movement, when to stop was to sink, to crumble, to fade into those dreary stains and succumb to the anxiety of endless repetition. Perhaps this is what we have been charged with, our own special version of penance for the piecemeal artwork we tried to pass as family, as trust, as strength. Perhaps this was the cost of the credence embedded in those ill-fitting wedding bands still buried in her sock drawer: a permanent inability to ever truly sort out beauty from pain, truth from lies, or success from failure. Those years of fealty remain sprawled out in the shadows of closets, under beds, and the hidden corners of our home, squirreled together like heaps of living question marks. Though golden hour settles slowly through the windows again, no longer dimmed by the lurking darkness of that incurable, invisible sickness, a hundred what-ifs and if-thens remain unanswered, gagged by the very strength that carried them both to the surface from those suffocating depths.