life’s surprises (la vida te da sorpresas)

There’s a grenade sitting in the pit of my stomach.
The days are viscous, the air is heavy. Reality doesn’t seem real. My head spins and I would like to just get to the other side of that thick wall made of everything I see, everything I touch.
I would like for this nightmare to end.
How to account for the tenderness of watching him sleep? His face poised and relaxed like a beautiful child’s.
How to account for the feeling of peace? Falling asleep breathing in his skin, my face buried in his chest, underneath the fort of the blankets.
And the hands I had begun to rely on? Small and white, hands that would give and take and feed. How can I ever eat the same foods without feeling starved?
My heart is broken.
In the recesses have snuck in the angry words, the tightness of his muscles, his quick, breathless breathing. His bitter tactics.
Love is empty.

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Sometimes, on the weekends when it was Dad’s turn to have us, Dad would keep me hostage. He’d call me from bed, where he’d lay day after day trying to drink himself into nothingness. My brothers and sisters would play. But I would come over because I felt sorry for Dad. And I missed him. I never had him long enough. He’d talk for hours, recalling everything painful that ever happened to him, intermittently crying and trying to salvage from his stories something he tried to pass off as a life lesson to me.
But mostly he’d cry and drift off.
During those hours I was dead with him. I knew Dad wanted to die, and I couldn’t bear to let him die alone.
Dad hit that point so many times. The point where they’d call in a nurse, usually my aunt, to feed him intravenously because he hadn’t eaten for days and had drank for too many. Dad used to like avocadoes. He used to drizzle lime juice over everything he ate. He liked meat tamales. He would smother his with plain yogurt, ketchup, mustard, and Worcestershire sauce. No one else could stand the sight, but this was his favorite thing to eat.
But Dad wouldn’t eat, when he was trying to die.
Mostly I think he wanted pity. He wanted to stay filthy and wallow in it, to feel unworthy of being loved. To convalesce. Then he could be nursed.
When the nurse would come with the IV, my entire world sank. The movement of the ground would make me dizzy. Once, Mamma Lily found me in the yard, sitting on the ground in a corner, legs crossed, head buried in my hands, sobbing for the death of my father. Choking, sinking.
The imminent death of my father. It was only a threat, but it was rock-hard as a fact. And it was always there.
What Daddy did was keep us hostage, punish us for his pain, force us to feel it with him.
At thirteen, I finally told Dad that I’d rather think he was dead than know he didn’t care about us. I wrote the letter in the US. Ten days later, in Managua, he died.
Instead of a father, I had an effigy I had to assemble from fragments, from memory, from everyone’s anecdotes. It was this effigy I rebelled against as a teenager and which I eventually learned to understand, accept, forgive. My paper-cutout of a father contained my entire heart, the safety I so desperately needed, my tears in the dark, my superhero with a cape, the stage lights of his smile beaming over my endeavors, my hope for the future, my dreams of healing him, of healing myself.
And that void, that deep abyss of longing that carved itself in me, and nothing will ever fulfill.