Father and I played the waiting game for years.  I wanted to apologize for whatever it was I had done. But, at the time I didn’t really understand why I should or the true subject of my apology. I would have given my left leg to have him glaring and shaking me again rather than have him regard me in utter silence…or not regard me at all.  And, I would have given anything to replace the deathly silence of the house with the sounds of two women- my grandmother and my mother- at constant war. But, it was as if my grandmother was born of everything loud and it all retreated when she disappeared.

Some people are like that- so much the embodiment of a thing that when they leave, that thing doesn’t exist anymore.  Even you yourself are left wondering why you should bother to exist.  And, there’s only one thing worse than questioning your existence- having someone else dear to you question it. When there were guests over, we’d assemble ourselves into some semblance of normalcy. But even the simplest simpleton saw through the act. For, every time I spoke when spoken to, father would look at me in stunned wonderment as if to say: “and yet HE lives, occupying space…breathing”.

Between the two of us, one was bound to break from all the pressure being built up around us.  Before long, it became vey clear that he had no intention, despite mother’s pleas and whimpers of being that person.  He’d never been a man to give up on a grudge and he wasn’t about to do so now… not even for a son.

So we just went along, much like the natives here in Antigua. It was a perpetual summer of discontent; waiting around aware of the dangers of our climate. At any time the deceptive calm could be broken by something suddenly popping out of the wide expanse of silence and heading along the right latitude and longitude towards us.  And indeed, sometimes, those things did pop up, almost like the little tropical storms here that arise to put a scare into the natives. But then these things died a quick and natural death and mother would be heard to sigh and all would be deceptively calm again. And we would wait for the next disturbance hoping it would bring the much needed chaos.

That disturbance never came.  And by the time I got to fully understanding things only grown-ups would, I’d acquired my own demons and had lost interest in the waiting game, my father, his silence and the general silence in which we were all entombed.  I drifted away in my own world and so too, I suppose, did he.

 (V.Damien)