HPLAR-Legacy of Disease

Today I remembered a dream I once had.
In it I was eight or nine years old and
I was sitting on the steps that led between
the first and second floors of our house. As
I sat there with my elbows on my knees I watched
as you injected death into the neck of some man
so that he could receive a moments high. His face
I still can not remember.

I guess maybe I shouldn't refer to it as the memory
of a dream for it was stark reality and I do not wish
to perpetuate a lie just so my mind will ease.  After all
you already know the truth.  It still gets to me though, that
image of you and he.  I still try somehow to make it something
that I conjured up that never really happened. Even as I remember
sitting there in wonder and amazement thinking, "I didn't know you
could do that" and pondering where the cloudy liquid had gone as
blood replaced it in the syringe.

Sometimes when I miss you so much that my heart feels as if it will
explode with the next breath this image comes back to me.  And it calms and soothes me because I begin to hate you again.  Hate you as I did for all those years before the months before your death.  Hate you for what
you allowed me - your baby girl - to see.  I'd like to think that knowing
I was in pain hurt you.  That knowing what you made me a party to was painful for you and you wouldn't have done it had you had any real choice. I'd like to think you couldn't help your choices because you were
sick.

That's what they used to tell me all the time.  "I'm not saying what he does is right, it's damn wrong.  But you have to understand he is sick, your father is sick baby. Those drugs - it's a disease." These were the same ones of course that, moments after your death, told me I had to focus on being strong for my mother as though the tears I shed for you meant nothing.  And I guess they were right.  In the end they meant nothing.

Over a year later I am still confused.  I am confused by your life.  I am confused by your death.  I am confused by this love and this hate I have for your.  I am confused by your never ending absence and how fourteen months and twenty days later it still shocks me whenever I try to focus on it enough to make it as real as that image of you and that syringe.

Sometimes I shed tears because I know I am your legacy.  There was ne'er a girl in all this world more like her father than I.  Does that mean I carry your disease?  Sometimes I think I do not and then I feel bereft and alone as though I am missing some important link to you and then I do
things I know I shouldn't just so that I can test my theory.  Sometimes I know that I do carry it and it is just a simple matter of time and the ability to fall far enough to activate that part of my biological structure. Sometimes I realize it is a self fulfilling prophecy because you left me with no answers.  Only questions that can never be answered by anyone walking this earth.

And when I call out to you, begging you to help me and guide me, you are silent.  You are as introverted as you ever were, giving me as many answers as you ever did.  And I am forced to sit on the side of my bed or in my car or walking down the street mourning in my heart a man I loved and hated. A man who left me with questions I have no answers for and to possess a legacy of something I never wanted, needed, or asked for.

And I hope, you are having fun in heaven...


JayLynn
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