Replay

Chapter 1: Ray

One am, walking across the street, my thoughts aren't very new. No one is out and it's drizzling. The sound of the raindrops touching the ground is not my favourite so I put my earphones on and play the sweet music. Shoe soles and clothes wet, I tread through the damp asphalt. This is what life has taught me: to walk right past all the stuff, as sometimes you just can't stop things from happening.

I believe that is more or less the key to dealing with life. You spend all your time trying to have control, until one day you realise that you don't have to. Sometimes life is better enjoyed as the traveller in the backseat of a moving car, staring out the window into the half emptiness and watching everything pass by, from the uneventfulness of grass and farms to the happenings in towns and cities. You just let go.

I come home to my dad screaming. I hear something fall down causing an awful crashing sound. Peeking inside the window, I see that it's the picture mom and I had framed and gifted to him on his birthday. I remember the pattern we made on the frame with little pearls all stuck next to each other.

That one bond.

I still remember the picture in the frame taken right before we shifted in this house; about 6 years ago. This house was so positive, bright, welcoming and always had this pleasant ambrosial smell. Now it's simply filled with nothing but cold, dark emptiness.

I glance at the shattered glass, the last reminder of mom, destroyed, just like everything else. Although it was only a material object, it felt like it was the last part of my heartbreaking. My dad wanted to erase her memory from his mind. This was very evident in all the years he spent drinking. He wasn't perfect, by far, but he knew how to love. He gave her everything she wanted, but when she died, it flipped a switch in him that made him completely broken,

I was about to swing open the door and clean the mess that he had made but I changed my mind.

Some things are better left broken.

Time had taught me to not mess with the man when he was angry. Anger is an easy way of dissipating emotions if you don't know how to deal with them.

With this, I walk into the darkness. Well, at least it's less dark than my hall. My room is possibly the grimmest place you would have ever seen, and I spent a great deal of my childhood in it. Looking at me, you would think that one thing is correlated with another. Is it?