Broken Tomorrow

If I did come back to this world again and I hope I could, I would choose another family not because my family in my present life isn’t good enough but because they are woefully pathetic.

Father left us when I barely knew myself. When I barely knew myself mother was all that was left. Every day and a thousand times a day, mother struggled to cater for us and very few things went right.

 Unfortunately, mother had very little formal education and could only take up very small menial jobs. But because mother was a smart woman, and what a smart woman she must have been, we never really lacked anything although we hardly had everything. Yet we were always fine and happy.

 I thought of father in the darkest of ways. How could one, anyone, be so cruel and heartless? For as much as mother tried to the best of her strengths to paint him to be a decent human being, as much as she spoke about their debut love dates and sparks, I saw him and the devil together in my imaginations and I couldn’t tell in detail which was which.

 I remember with little exertion of mental energy one of the fewest evening walks we ever had together as a family. We were four. My sister Amy was about seven and I was a little over three. Mother at that time was still ravishing in monstrous beauty.

 Looking back in time I should have cherished that walk more than I did then. It was the last we would ever have together as a whole unit because since then we had had numerous walks – a deliberate attempt to rekindle the burning sensation we once had and to repair the fragmented sections we have now become. Needless to say how much that failed.

 It was on the eve of my fourth birthday. Father had gone to the grocery store. This was supposed to be huge but father never came back home. He got up, looked me in the eyes and just left.

 So if I said I never ever had a father I wouldn’t be wrong as I had consciously with great efforts tried to erase whatever memory I had of him from my recollection.

 One thing which I enamored of mother was her ability to successfully turn down the advancements of different men who came after her. It didn’t matter to any reasonable extent that I was a man myself. I hated every single member of the male species with equal proportion of disgust that I made sure no one had more than the other because hatred not properly shared would relatively mean love for another. Thus it was difficult to imagine mother with another man not because I valued and respected father but because I loathed him.

 Growing up with a single parent wasn’t the easiest of lives for whatever duty each parent was meant to play was performed either by one person or not at all and by my assessment mother was very close to perfection in a way that the oceans and seas superimposed themselves.

 As I grew up into a man I never wanted to become, I realized how much of a flawed person my father was. Mother had designed his world with colors but he was color blind: a person not worthy of any good but who lived anyway because someone of superior tendencies had handed him life.

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Amy’s life was like the strings of a Ukulele fully stretched to its limits but still producing melodious music. Everything about her was beautiful except her past and present which were the same color as coal was and were dull and defeated.

 When we were still in elementary school Amy excelled in a way I could only dream of and I thought in all honesty that success wasn’t for everyone or everyone couldn’t achieve success using the same means.

 Our house sat side by side with other natural features. On the right well guarded by a small hill and on all the other sides surrounded by a small river so that on the eventuality that the river ever crossed its banks mermaids were to be our new family.

 One evening we were having lunch in the time for dinner because if we had lunch during lunch time then we would have nothing but palm wine for dinner and mother dreaded the idea let alone the execution. We still had our plates in hands when two well built men stormed into the house and took mother away for debts she had owed them and was unable to pay yet.

 Mother never owed anyone except us who she owed love and when she had nothing else to give to us she still showed us love. But this time she only borrowed to pay our school fees after we had been thrown out of school, this only time when she did good with the intention to show us love, this only time it had backfired.

 That night Amy and I couldn’t sleep. The men promised to bring mother back if they had any assurance that she would indeed pay back their money. But we had heard this story before; we have seen our father leave in smaller troubles and never return and somehow we felt history was repeating itself like it usually did.

 The next day the men returned and I was livid. Mother wasn’t with them, if anything she was far from home. They came to abduct us too. It was Amy who saved us this time by giving them the money mother had owed them. How she got the money I hadn’t a clue at that time but it was because of her still that mother returned unlike father.

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 Today is Amy’s graduation and from afar off from where I sat mother was ravishing in monstrous beauty and father was nowhere to be found.

 There is a loud noise outside and everyone rushes to see. Mother and I rush too but Amy is nowhere to be found.

 I get outside and I see the biggest nightmare of my life, the fallen wonder of my existence.

Amy in her graduation gown is wearing a handcuff for her involvement in a drug cartel, in the same scene a lifeless body with blood scattered beautifully like tattoos is lying on the floor. Father is wearing a handcuff too for killing the man. Father is in the same drug cartel as Amy. I turn to mother. She doesn’t show any emotion; the man lying on the floor is her ex-lover. Mother turns to me, sees the disappointment in my eyes and slumps.

 If I did come back to this world again and I hope I could, I would choose another family not because my family in my present life wasn’t good enough but because they were woefully pathetic.

(All images excerpted from the Internet)