the.light.and.the.dark

I had imagined the end of the world before.

Driving up and down highways, interstates, back and forth on state routes. I saw humanity's lease running out. The length of untilled fields stretching out, abandoned cars on the shoulder, collapsed overpasses preventing passage; the detritus slandering the once pleasant horizon. A passing vision, but one I never could tear away from.

I rode that way so many times. That vision, my navigator. Corralling my pervading hope for a future that I knew was but a piss into the wind. When I tried to parse it out in my head to make sense in order to dissuade myself, the dread set in more firm. Like a Candiru fish in the Amazon, the spikes of dread spread out as it burrows deep into you. The harder I tried to rip it from my mind the more firmly it held. I felt it and tried so hard to get rid of that feeling. But the more I drove and the more I searched I could no more find a shining bit of hope than I could find the end of the road. Endless road and endless despair.

Then came my salvation in the form of my son. His light pushed back the dark. The road still stretched out before me but the daunting bleakness kept at bay. I finally had a companion, a sidekick. But more than that, he became my guide. His warmth was a compass; my North Star. I would follow him wherever he went. The gloom remained but traveling the roads with him was like walking through a forest at night with the brightest lantern. He was pure effulgence and I basked in him.

Though I never fell down the well, I couldn't stop gazing into it.

Humanity was like that. So many staring into the placid waters of a deep, dark well. Like the frog staring up at its reflection, not realizing it was already free to run and save itself. It kept staring, wishing with pennies and penance and pleading for the answers, convinced that they would come from above and not from within. But when you wait too long, the weight becomes too much, and all you need... is a push.

I was on the phone with him when that push came.


"I miss you."

Weeks had gone by since I last heard from his mother. It was a battle from the beginning, just to be allowed the privilege of being a father to my son. We fought about almost everything when we were together and then everything else when we weren't. I never imagined I would be denied spending time with my son. Even as nonchalant as my own father was about being a figure in the lives of my sisters and I he still had an open door invitation from my mother to see us. Because being a parent isn't about what you want, it's about what the child needs.

And a son needs his father.

More so now than ever, my son needs his father.

I was sitting on the steps in front of my apartment, watching storm clouds roll in, my phone pressed tightly against my ear as my son told me about his day and what he was watching on television at that moment and what he ate earlier. His voice in my ear is like a tickle, but the kind that doesn't make you laugh. A playful touch from a loved one that you welcome as you yearn for that connection, that physical bridge that spans the void between him being there, me being here, and where I wanted us to be: together. Any place, as long as we are there together. Where we were then was always overcast, it was always a day without sunshine.

The sound of something heavy colliding with something soft registered in my gut even before it even registered in my brain. My ears heard it, tried to make sense of it. It was like hands slapping ground beef into patties, that wet sound of thwup thwup. Then my eyes saw the pickup truck, barreling down the street... bodies in its wake. If I hadn't been on the phone, perhaps I would have been lucid enough to bolt into the street and push someone, anyone, out of the way, sacrificing my own body for the safety of theirs. Instead, I watched in mute horror as the front bumper, now glistening with a coat of crimson paint like grisly, puckered lips, made a wet smacking sound as it collided with the blonde braid of my neighbors daughter. One last kiss as the lights turned out.

In the following minutes - hours? - that passed, a pervading thought scratched at my brain until I realized what it was: the little girl had been standing in the street. Not running from one side to the other. Standing there, as if she was trying to remember why she had walked into the street in the first place. Standing there without so much as a flinch at the sound of a two-ton vehicle speeding towards her or the screams of pedestrians as they were either witness or victims of the massacre. Up and down the block, as the truck sped through the stop sign, my neighborhood was flooded with wailing voices, screaming for the dead and screaming for the living, some full of hope and some full of dread.

Dread... the clouds! I thought a storm was quietly rolling in as I sat there. Those clouds were something else entirely though. Something quiet but something much more malicious than a beautiful summer rainstorm.

That was when I remembered the phone in my hand.

"Hello? Greyson, buddy, are you still there?"

Silence.

"Grey, talk to me... are you still there? Is everything ok?"

From somewhere in my consciousness I heard his voice, almost as if I was hearing the echo of a voice through the the static of an old radio: 

"Daddy? Something is wrong with mom."



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