2009
My dad and I are waiting to pick my sister up from school. I am eight. He has just lost his job, but not yet his momentum, and we are singing Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better) from Annie Get Your Gun.
Between verses we drink cherry limeades from Sonic. Before the song ends–when there is still time to wait–our singing collapses into slurping. I keep glancing at his drink. The cherry is the first thing I eat in mine. He saves his for last, often for me. When he catches me staring–big-eyed and greedy–he offers it.
I take it. I forget to enjoy it.
It tastes like cigarettes. Or the smoke still hanging in the car. I don’t know. I don’t mind.
The taste becomes familiar. The smell, too.
In the years that follow, it trails him everywhere. The stuffy car, the cracked garage door, the rasp in his laugh that grows rougher each year.
Only later will I know it as a death sentence.
2012
The ordinary is calcified. My mother’s pleas for him to quit are ritual now.
On the way to school, she vents to me. I stare ahead in silence, unsure of what answer she wants. This only upsets her more.
I feel bad for them both. It seems like an adult matter I cannot name, and so I do not know how to feel.
I pray they still love each other during first period.
2014
My father spends more time in the garage. Or maybe he always did, and I only notice now. My mother no longer hides her complaints: the “skunk” smell seeping through the walls, the alcohol on his breath.
She asks me to ask him to quit because he listens to you more than me. She says he is killing himself.
Her breath smells of Diet Coke and toothpaste.
I don’t remember much else from this time. Only that I wished the weight they carried was not my own.
2017
My father and I do not sing Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better) anymore; we live it–trading silence for silence, rage for rage–competing for who can disappoint my mother the most.
And I think I win.
I slam doors. My days disappear into nights. I lose myself in drugs. My voice grows sharp, and I hear him in the reverberations. I see him in the mirror.
I think he sees himself when he looks at me.
It does not hit me until 2023: if my anger takes the shape of his, if my silence sounds like his own, he may never love me again. He is incapable of loving himself…I am apprenticing his pattern.
2025
I am tired.
I have a drinking problem because I have a flirting-with-death problem, tired.
Between the first and third drink, warmth comes. I remember I have a pulse because I can finally feel it again.
By the fifth drink, I think about my father.
When the count is gone, when the glass is only habit in my hand, I hear it–my own voice, his voice–anything you can do, I can do better.
I reach for the next.
404 diary 