Howl

Seven months ago, I walked out on my mother and Michael because Michael and I were stepping on each others’ toes. My mother, having just had foot surgury, crawled up the stairs towards me sobbing begging me to stay. I stood and watched her. When she got to the top I walked down past her and out the door. I would do the same again. That was six months before she died. I missed her last birthday. I would do the same thing again. I didn’t know she was about to die. I would do the same thing again. Fuck him for stealing that time from me, from my mother, from us. I don’t understand why he doesn’t have any self reflection — any self awareness. He makes me feel as though I’m the crazy one, as though everything’s my fault. He is absolutely certain about everything. I hate him. I will either kill him or myself. I blame him for my suicidality as a child (though these things are overdetermined): there was no other way to communicate distress, and that didn’t work. When I was a kid he would drive and drive around the city and never listen when I asked to go home for bed because I had school in the morning. I once screamed and beat my head against the pillar of the car while he stood outside at the planetarium and looked at the night sky. Nobody cared, and it is impossible to communicate what I need. When I walked out he found me at the metro station and asked “What do you need?” and I said “to be left alone” and he just stood there until the train came and he got on behind me. I got to the next station to change trains and he stood on the platform and watched me wait inside the train until it left. I hate him. I hate myself. I don’t know whom to kill or why except that he wasted the last years of my mother’s life. He knows it, too. The fucker. He wouldn’t come to my graduation unless I invited him and my mother didn’t feel comfortable travelling alone so she cried at me until I asked him to come and he’s never so much as apologized. There’s tiny signs of progress. He apologized to me once two hours after I asked him not to call the electricity company on my behalf (the next week he tried to make an ophthamologist’s appointment on my behalf) and he said “no, I’m just trying to help you.” I said “it feels as though you’re seizing control” and he said “you’re wrong, that’s not what’s happening here.” Two hours later he apologized for “overstepping my boundaries.” That’s the only time he’s ever apologized; I do not know how many such incidents — usually once a day he does something that I don’t want him to, but I’ve long since given up on arguing. About once a month I try and he reacts that way. And he doesn’t apologize. Or he comes to me sobbing and beating his breast about his impfections and begs me to forgive him; that happened once, too. I think that those are the only apologies he’s given in the time I’ve known him, and as I say it’s close to once a day he does these things. I would walk out on her again today. If I thought she’d be here when I got back. I didn’t know that she would die so soon.