It’s not a daily occurrence for a guy like me to actually
say I have had a normal day.
Pleasant
days come and go, major internal turmoil shapes my soul but my life is not for
the fainthearted. The story of my what I can call my current life begins with a simple phone call
from a business associate of my father, my father was in construction and he
had built a better part of the middle class society. Anyone who identifies as middle class has either rented , owned or considered buying a house that my father built. After many years of this hard life I can’t say that my father has been happy a day of his life. Two months after my 17th birthday on one of those days kid my age would be at home playing PlayStation a phone call rang in the hall ways. I was in the family room at that time but couldn’t be bothered to pick it up.
My mother, the home maker and basically the glue that kept our family together answered. I heard her gasp and stifle a shriek so i jumped up to go check on her.
“What’s wrong mum?” I asked her.
She slowly turned around to face me and with with what looked like great effort, she said ”Your father is gone”.
I felt my knees give way and had to lean on the wall for a second to compose myself.
In that moment, something snapped in the back of my head. My vision of the world changed and i didn't know it at the time but I think its when the weight of responsibility finally became clear to me.
The weight that made me straighten up, walk to my mother and hold her to tell her “Everything will be okay mum, I am here for us”
The rest of the evening was spent moving from the house to the morgue, phone calls from business associates, family members coming by with messages of condolences and comforting my siblings.
Life at that moment felt like that time lapse with me in the centre and everything moving in rabid succession around me. All of it moving so quickly with me making mechanical responses and monotonous answers, all up in until the time i collapsed in bed. All I remember next was a 5 am alarm clock i had set for myself signaling the morning after…………….
