Requiem for a nuclear family

We are all capable of seeing. We just choose to ignore what we find.

“Can you come here within the next hour?”

It’s one of those days again. You’re sitting in front of a computer screen, rotting your brains with video games as you procrastinate, yet again. Down you go. Fit that 30 minute exercise that you do every day, run for the shower, get dressed, grab the keys, out you go. And through all this, they couldn’t hear a thing.

You felt an awkward tension in that car, but you knew not to say anything – you’re a chauffeur by heart, anyways. You could taste the animosity in your throat, but you were too busy swallowing mucous from your nostrils. You drove speed limit through the evening skies of old country Mayfield. Soon this will be nostalgia.

A tasteful dinner, but distasteful in its salty sociology. You begin to wonder why no one says anything around the dinner table, and yet you’re confused with your mother’s voice, oscillating in your mind as clear as when you were a child – “You never hide things from the family. There is no use. Let us mend your wounds.” How can wounds be nursed if they are not shown?

You sat quietly as the rest of the table passed on. You hear the sucker-fake cries and you know it’s nothing but the idiocy from which responds. It’s routine, but you hate it. You want to say everything your mind can hold, but you know you cannot. You are the enemy of a gaudy family, and all the same you love it. You protect it with your life, but you know you’re leaning over a bed of porcelain needles painted blood-red. You remain quiet.

Why won’t your parents listen? Why won’t they do anything? You worry with everything you have, including your life-yearned career, and you have yet to be happy about living. There is nothing but the churning acid in your bowels that you feel, and you know something is going wrong. But you stay quiet.

Damn you. Curse you. Have you no dignity to save yourself or your family?

It’s 10:00 on the radio clock. You drive uneasily, but you drive speed limit, unlike those that you live for. You are the only one willing to be patient, and be a patient.

And through the entire drive, you yearn to unlearn your narcissism and pride that you acquired from an uneasy deal with the nymphs and faeries. You want to unlearn your inability to admit you’re wrong. You want. You have. You die slowly.

You tied an adjustable knot around your next talisman of hope. Let its resilience and strength bring your light to your family, for they too need to be protected.

Reprise.