STORM IN THE SKY
The skies are overcast. The wind grows steadily more fierce.
She stands on the roof of her apartment. How strange, she thinks to herself, that I’m the only one here. Am I the only one who’s excited about the storm?
Maybe not everybody has time enough to sit and enjoy a storm. Maybe not everybody could sit down and enjoy a storm.
She sees the first crack of lightning. She counts the seconds silently. She hears the thunder. The storm is really close.
Her phone buzzes. A text.
“Are you out on the roof too?”
“Yes,” she replies.
She wonders where the rain is. As if almost on cue, it starts to rain. It starts to pour, actually. She runs for the cover of the rooftop garden shed.
“I see lightning.”
She smiles. “I saw it first,” she says. “I heard the thunder too.”
“We heard the thunder at the same time.”
“It’s raining here. I get the rain before you.”
She smiles again.
“No, you didn’t”
The magic and mystery of a thunderstorm had fascinated her ever since she was a child. Her cousin had been too safe and too scared to ever allow her to venture out in a storm. Her father had been more lenient. How wonderful it was now for her to find somebody who enjoyed storms just as much as she did!
Maybe it’s not that people didn’t have time to sit and enjoy a storm. Maybe it was just that not everybody wanted to sit down and enjoy a storm.
Maybe not everybody could sit down and enjoy a storm.
****
FATHER
“Have I ever told you about my father?”
The park bench was clothed in the soft glow of the street lamp. Her shadow looked very small next to his.
“Have I ever told you about my father?” she asked again.
“I am trying to think if you have… No. No, I don’t think you have. All you’ve told me is that he…”
“That he’s in prison.”
Silence. Cicadas. The faint sound of faraway traffic.
“He was convicted of illegal possession. I was seventeen when he was sentenced. He still has three years left to serve.”
“I know of people who have been imprisoned. But not all of their daughters have tried to kill themselves.”
“That wasn’t the only reason why I wanted to die.
Back at the time, I was… devastated. People I had never seen in my entire life would come up to me and say they were sorry. I survived only because Roy protected me.”
Silence. Cicadas.
“Have you ever visited him? In prison, I mean.”
She looked at him.
It was strange how she wasn’t shouting at him. How many times had her cousin tried to take her with him to the prison? She had shouted at him every single time, hadn’t she?
“No.”
“It probably isn’t easy being in prison. If I were ever there, I would at least wish for the people I cared for to be able to forgive me. To be able to understand my mistakes and not hold me accountable for all of them.”
“So are you saying I must forgive him?!”
She did shout, after all.
Silence. A passing car.
“Have you ever had to stand where I did? Do you have any idea about what it’s like?” She was almost whispering.
“Do you know what it’s like,” she repeated, louder this time, “to have the one person in your life you’ve always, always looked up to, the one person who you believed could do no wrong ever, the one person who was always on your side… to have them taken away from you? All those dreams that you had, shattered, left in pieces. Do you know how it sounds like when all these come crashing down on you? They… they don’t just hurt you. They shake you so bad, they bury you and then… And then you can’t get up, no matter how hard you try… You can’t get back up on your feet.”
She could feel the tears start to well up in her eyes. But she went on.
“I have never really known my mother. I was three when she died. I don’t even remember her. Dad was all the family I had in the world, dad and Roy.
Every time Roy visited him there, I… I wondered why I wouldn’t go with him. Somehow, it always felt like… It was easier to be angry with him, you know? I had built up this image of him, and there he was the bad guy. He wore a dark hat and dark glasses. It was always easier to shout at him and blame that image for everything that went wrong in my life. When Roy died…
I knew that if I ever saw his face… I would lose that image. I would not have anybody to blame anymore. If I ever saw him, I would be sorry for him… For my father.
Perhaps that’s the worst thing any parent could have, to have their own child pity them.”
Strangely, her tears had remained in the confines of her eyes. She wiped them away.
“I… I have not seen my dad for almost two years now.”
“When you were on that bridge that day. What did you think of him then?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t even remember to think anything of him.”
“I don’t know what kind of a person your father is, but in certain that, that when he gets out…Three years later, the first face he would want to see is yours.”
“And I’d be dead.”
“And you’d be dead.”
Silence. The slight rustle of leaves in the wind. Cicadas.
“That’s just another reason to get me to like you, isn’t it?”
She looked at him. He was smiling. She smiled too.
“Do you know what I think you should do?”
“What?”
“At least write him a letter, stranger.”
“Okay.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Wow.”
“Wow to you too.”
The moon hiding behind the clouds. The faint stars. The twilight darkness in the shadows away from the lamp.
Cicadas. Silence. The muted sounds of distant traffic.
“The worst thing a parent could have is for their child to not pity them for their faults.”
*****