The rain had stopped now, or at least to the point where it only
made a sporadic splay of minuscule drops against the windowpane. With fingers
shaking and warped with arthritis he opened the door, just wide enough to fit
his frail, raincoat-clad body through. There was a silent fear about him as for
the first time he was aware of his own dementia. Even I, for all my lack of
intuition could tell that I was not wanted in seeing him out. I remained frozen
by the seat as my eyes saw him to the door.
He was gone, both indefinitely and never. I clenched my temples with
near-fisted hands and gritted my teeth in a bracing grimace, allowing for sharp
draughts of air in surging palpitations. Absolute anger forced my eyes shut
till they forged wrinkles across my face. They were the inglorious wrinkles of
a man aged by his own seclusion and repression, of a man who needs the hand of
another to smooth them out, just when he has warded everyone else off.
I felt an unbroken streak of some fifteen years coming to an end; my
tear ducts no longer ran dry as anger, grief and remorse in its most ceaseless
form flooded the entirety of my face, leaving me frozen in the most incurable,
shameful of stupors. With an outlandish swell of romanticism I longed for the
far-flung day that my face, without the blatant contortion of self-induced
neurosis, could show the fragility of tears and the resilience of a smile all
at once, just like my father had mere minutes ago.
For the past 28 years I had been living in a state of perpetual
nihilism, using my Oxbridge degree as a lifelong pass to do absolutely nothing
with it. I had belittled a past accomplishment whilst using it as the only
thing to define myself, giving me the perfect excuse to enhance my snobbery
with fancy words and become an armchair critic in the presence of others,
bringing up the biggest name-drop in conversation so that they could feel my
superiority for me. I was consumed with nothing but the urge to scream, but
ultimately immense fear held me back, for I knew that I would either keep the
scream inside of me, or hear it in perpetual ricochets around the walls in
which I was to live alone.
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