I woke up in the morning and there he was. Clinging onto me gently from a tear-induced sleep. I felt his breath on my back creeping up slowly to my neck. It gave me chills but did not keep me warm like it used to. The overwhelming realization of the things I had said the night before began to hit me, buliding up and collecting into a headache to the rythym of his exhales. I knew suddenly and without question that it was over. I had to tell him. But I didn’t wake him. It was going to be a long day.

It’s hard to find the words lately. I feel like I’ve said them all.

 I’ve decided to stop buying Sweet Leaf Tea in the glass bottles from now on. The advice on each bottlecap seems to mock me every day. “make love, not war.”  “be grateful for what you have” “the grass is always greener”..you get the picture. And all a gal wanted was to enjoy her tea.

 I’m enjoying my time alone and wonder whether or not that’s a good thing. I don’t know the difference between feeling lonely and being alone anymore. Maybe I’ve gotten used to it way before now. Or maybe the worst is yet to come. I kind of hope it is actually. It would give me a certain punishment I feel I deserve. But I can’t help this. Could I have prevented it? I try not to answer that one.

 I finally have time to think and find it’s harder than ever to do so. One of the things I’m enjoying actually is the not having to think. Nobody asking me questions I don’t have answers to.  Nobody to really talk to and that’s even okay I guess. The silence is peaceful. Ironically, gives me even more time to think. But for now, I’m taking a mental vacation so to speak. I don’t really know when I’ll be returning.

 I could live in my head forever.

You’d never know it, but I truly am a lucky, lucky girl.

He came home last night. We sat by the lake and talked lightly whilst the radio played nearby from an open car door. I asked if he was bored to which he quickly returned “Not if I’m with you”.. We have a smooth operator here it seems. I guess I was expecting some kind of romantic ode to nature and the lake and how we should do things like this more often..That is more less what page I was on anyway. He needs “constant stimulation” he says. I don’t know what I need. We are different in so many ways, a fate that has always worked to our advantage until recently. It’s raising questions in the both of us. Uncertainty. We take turns on being terrified and consoling the other. We have grown impatient. But four and half years is nothing compared to the rest of our lives. I’m trying to put that into perspective. This is nothing. The time has come to grow up and face the reality of human nature. It is unreasonable to expect perfection. It is unreasonable to expect disaster. Love is such a tiny little word that doesn’t justify such a feeling. My feet are not cold, but rather clammy and sticking to the surface.

What an odd species us humans are.

 I took advantage of a lazy Sunday and spent the majority of the day on the couch watching random things on t.v. Rotting my brain, yes but also I suppose I should have picked out something a little more uplifting, but instead decide to watch something on god knows what channel, I think it was “E!” entitled “Going Postal-25 acts of Violence”   I caught it somewhere around 21 I guess which happened to be the story of a nice, normal looking guy that killed several people at an investment agency because he kept losing money. At his own fault mind you, not that this would make any difference or jusify the deaths of those innocent people. It kept going down the list, some of them I remember vividly watching live on the tube (circa Columbine and Virginia Tech)…There was one about a man on a subway who sat in the very back and proceeded to take out a gun and start shooting people at random in the back of the head. They let this same man represent himself in trial and refer to himself in the third person while he asked all of the eye-witnesses and family members of the victims questions about the event..as if he were actually innocent. Why would the law allow such a thing? This caused a debate between Kenneth and I when I reffered to our law as being severely “flawed”..He didn’t agree and proceeded to tell me this a country founded on principles that everyone is entitled to a trial, blah blah, and that the law treats everyone equally..Meanwhile, O.J. Simpson is playing golf somewhere. Apparently there was another guy who got killed by Charles Whitman on the UT Tower that was merely sitting outside him dorm building eating a sandwich, over half a mile away from the actual tower..Why do these things happen? Such injustice. And who is to blame? What came first, the chicken or the egg? What came first, guns or people crazy enough to kill the innocent with them?  I happen to live in a state where owning a gun is not only encouraged, but gun control of any sort is highly looked down upon. And now I am torn. Is there any solution? I am admittidly simple-minded when it comes to these things, but I seriously doubt when they wrote in the constitution that everyone has a right to bear arms, that their kids were shooting each other in school and so on, etc… And for what?  Were we too lazy as humans to hunt our food down bow and arrow style like the natives? We needed to come up with something much more effective. Much more deadly. Much more..american.

 Last year in England, whose gun control laws are some of the scrictist in the world, there were 4 deaths by shooting. Presently in America, there are approximately 30 deaths by shooting every day. And everyone profits and continues to promote our right to bear arms..And maybe we should..if only to protect ourselves from all the crazys around that are also allowed to have them. And besides, where else would we get things to base countdown shows on ‘E!’ from?

I drive by that house at least a few times a week. It’s almost completely redone now. I kind of always just imagined it sitting there old and broken, and eventually destroyed and rebuilt, much like the surrounding property. It looks bounds and leaps different from what we used to reside in. Maybe it’s finally the way my dad had always imagined it..Oh, but was he ever in over his head. It was one of those things in your life, sort of like a bad relationship..where you know it will eventually fall through and you never really imagine a real future with it..This is how I felt about the house, and never one to dissapoint, my dad made sure this was an accurate prediction.
 I think it took him a record breaking 7 odd months to finish the roof. Considering his lifestyle, this was actually quite impressive. He always meant well and come to think of it, used to recite the phrase “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”  What insight. Although I never remember him saying what the road to heaven was paved with..
 A few most likely meth induced weeks later, he had finished an entire room. He did it up with fancy ceiling lights and all. They celebrated and rented a whole room’s worth of swanky leather furniture, and the biggest t.v. we had ever been in possesion of. All of a sudden, we remembered civilization and lived it up watching cable and enjoying the cool breeze of the window unit. Classy. At least an improvement from the ridiculously small for 4 people travel trailer. There was hope yet.. And 6 or so months later the furniture was repossessed.
 We actually lived in the house a good few years though I found excuses to rarely be there. This time when mom left him, it was a sigh of relief and we moved into a cozy apartment.  I had my own room again which was a forgotten luxury. I never stepped inside that house again.
 And there it is. All shiny and done up, and I’m sure the fancy ceiling lights have been replaced with something even more extravagant. But the roof is the same one my dad layed with his own two hands.. There seem to be pieces of my past scattered randomly about this little town..I wonder if I’d miss them should I ever move to the bigtime. There are some of  them that I’d rather forget.

She drove up closer to the driveway he had described over the phone, her stomach still in knots. How silly, she thought, that the thought of seeing her own father would make her so nervous, however it had been almost two years. She questioned in her mind whether he realized this or not. She sees the sign and secretly hopes to not find the room number he was residing in. For reasons she does not understand, the cell phone call to ask him which room it was again was a big ice breaker and alleviated the long shaky walk to the door awaiting an opening. He stood outside and there was no more worry or wonder about what he may look like now.

The initial greeting was casual. There was a hug and a kiss on the top of her head as if nothing had ever gone wrong. There was more meat on his bones than the last hug that took place after picking him up from the county jail. He had said the food was terrible and his body told the same story. An unwillingly retired electrician, he was now the “pit master” at the local barbecue joint, a sort of job she had never imagined him having in all the years of her life. It was due to several nerve and spine problems that limited him physically to the point of having to give up the thing he most enjoys doing. This was a tiny notch in the ever expanding belt of grievances he had accumulated throughout the years, however still instilled more pity in her toward him and allowed for a bit of forgiveness if nothing else.

The knots in her stomach began to loosen and they talked as if they talked quite frequently. She had decided to put the past on the back burner for now and for a brief moment, this made her feel content. There were no words of advice given or traditional father-daughter gab that she imagined other people must have somewhere. These things were replaced by barbeque, beer and the simplicity of the nearby river to which they both agreed to go. They talked until sunset while taking in the rather sudden breeze that passed over them and the waterfalls nearby. “Look at how the wind blows the water backward and creates a mist”, he said. He suggested this would make for a rather awesome picture if either of them actually had the skill to walk across the edge of the slippery moss-laced falls and capture it with the camera she had brought along. She settled for a picture of him with the magical mist in the background instead.

She focused in on him for a bit. His hair, which had turned unfamiliar shades of gray and white crept out from a baseball cap and made her feel equally nostalgic and old. His rough, callused hands that seemed to tell the story of his tragic existence in every crease, scar and scab. His easygoing and humble sense of humor which she had missed so much was sparking better memories of her childhood. An inside joke or two was exchanged and for the first time in several years, she felt as if she had been missing something so important. All the things she had built up inside herself, her secret vendetta to him, started to fade gently and she started to see him as a man rather than just her father. A man struggling so desperately to survive off the scraps of bridges he had burnt along the way. She felt no anger or ill will toward him, but rather empathy and understanding. Some infinite cloud of unsaid professions lingered above them as they hugged goodbye.

She felt a rush of overwhelming accomplishment as she drove away. She had grown up. She knew pain and struggle. She understood again what love could be. She shed a single tear as she pulled away and held back the pool that remained settling in her eyes. And she promised herself she wouldn’t cry. Not for those reasons. She remembered a more dominant version of him telling her as a child when she wept to”stop whining or I will give you something to cry about”..And did he ever.

I think my dad is in jail again. I usually find out this information weeks or so later from my sister or some other random person much more distant from me (like someone who saw our elaborate last name in the local paper). I’m not surprised or anything, I figured it would be happening again sooner or later. I have found myself wondering lately if it’s the best place for him. I also find myself wondering if there is such a place for him at all. I guess you could say I have found myself wondering about him alot more than anything.

 We have a tragic history really. Something I think we both always wanted to remedy somehow, some way..But it never took off. Sure, theres regret and it scares me that it might be there forever and after rather than ever get resolved. I dont so much as picture a moment where we have some sort of “revelation” and hash all this shit out once and for all..I don’t think I will get that chance and it’s fucking terrifying. Now more than ever.

 I have sort of a go-to good memory of just the two of us involving Zilker Park and him saving me from an almost-freak bicycle accident. I was 8 and I remember throwing up silently the whole night before as to not let him know I was too sick to really go. I sucked it up and pretended to feel fine and dandy and we went to the park as planned. The good part of the memory ends when I end up getting sick on myself later on from whatever I had the night before and dad yelling at me to “get my ass in the truck” and a rant about how I should have told him I was sick..(most likely so he wouldn’t have had to keep his promise and take me in the first place)..

 I wish things were different. Lord knows I’ve made attempts to make it so..But I suppose it all justifies the phrase that some things never change. I can only imagine the guilt he feels and sometimes that alone can twist my mood and let me forgive him for everything somehow.  I am slowly starting to realize that I only know of one person in my short little treebranch of family that made it past 60… I think dad is pushing 42 or so now… I honestly can’t believe he made it this long…

Every day I wonder if he is okay. I hope he knows that.

I love Austin. We go way back, infact I was born smack dab in the heart of her in Brackenridge Hospital, as was the case with my sister and brother, though I do not think they feel Austin to be quite “home”. We moved here when I was 11 and my sis was 3 and my brother vaguely even knows what Austin is, except that Austin Park and Pizza is supposedly located there.

 We moved a lot. And I don’t mean a lot like “we got a lot of rain last night”, I mean it more like “there’s a lot of black people in Africa”.
Needless to say, this was not the most pleasant thing in the world for a young one such as myself. I find moving as an adult to be it’s own small form of torture, but it was much worse as a kid because you don’t see the benefit of it. Moving meant changing schools, finding new friends, getting used to another apartment, and even the possibility-slash- repititious pain of mom and dad either splitting up or getting back together again..Either one required yet another move.

 Present day here in Marble Falls or “Marvelous Falls” as I hear it sarcastically referred to at times. And I’m lucky really. I’m glad to be here. There are people that travel from far away to see this place and here I am living in it and taking it constantly for granted. Even now I feel a bit of guilt for mentioning Austin in such a great light in comparison with the town I live in now… But this place has become a sort of safety net for me. It’s comfortable and does not require change. Change and I, we’ve never been the best of friends, though we sort of have a love/hate relationship. I as a person have changed tons and in my own humble opinion for the better, at least when it comes to matters of responsibility and self control. etc.. I’ve also changed physically in some ways, and some of them not so much for the better, however those are things that can be remedied by (you guessed it)-change..And it’s easier said than done.

  And about 45 minutes away lies my sanctuary. Home. Contant nostalgia passing the formerly frequented grocery stores and elementary schools. The houses and apartment buildings that look so much smaller now than when we lived in them. Some have been replaced by new fancier contructions. I admire the surviving nature of this city. Trees as far as the eye can see as you mozy down Mopac, not to mention Barton Springs and Zilker Park. No smell of overwhelming exhaust and gasoline as in some of the other overrated cities. People on bikes and of all different colors, sizes, and skin decor. Diversity. I love it here. And it’s so close yet so far away at times. Will I ever leave the nest?  Will I someday jump into the blind oblivion of this place I’m calling home?  What is home really if not an escape?