Because I can live with being hated.
I can live with being punished.
I can live with pain.
What I still don't know how to live with is the possibility that I spent my entire life trying to earn something that was never mine to begin with. Something I was never going to get anyway.
I back out of the driveway.
I think about what he said on the drive back.
I run it the way I run game tape. Not to feel it. Just to see it.Because you need to be the best. Push it down.I have been hearing this my whole life in one form or another and hearing it out loud, in that flat certain voice, changes nothing. He was not sorry. He did not ask how I felt. He looked at me the way he has always looked at me — like something he made and is still in the process of correcting — and delivered the same instruction he has been delivering since I could remember. Fixing what is wrong with me, until his last breath comes.
He is not sorry.
He is never going to be sorry.
He is going to die in that bed waiting for a liver that might not arrive and he is going to die absolutely positive that he was right and I am going to have to figure out what to do with that.
I have spent my entire life building around his instructions. I don't know who I am outside of it and that is the thing — the real thing, the one I won't look at, the one I put in a room so long ago the room has become part of the entire structure of who I am —
That is the thing I drove two and a half hours to ask about.
And he said push it down.
And I am pushing it down.
I am always pushing it down.
I pull into my parking lot.
Engine off.
I think about Danny.
I put Danny in a room.
I think about Jonah.
I try to put Jonah in a room too.
It doesn't go as cleanly.
I think about the ice.
The shoulder. The left edge that keeps breaking down under pressure because I am compensating for something I learned so early I can't find the original wound anymore — just the habit, just the thing I keep doing that isn't quite right and keeps not being quite right no matter how many times I run the drill.
It’s not right.
I’m not right.
Push it down, Jamie.
I push it down.
I go inside.
I have practice.
