oliver [d7; fin]

I once told my father I thought I could see heaven just beyond the sunrise. He scoffed, told me people like us don’t go to places like that, and I wondered for a damn long time what he meant.

When I found out, I truly wished I had stayed naïve.

Childhood’s innocence was a trait that extended long past the age of eighteen for many, and even once the brink of adulthood had been reached and passed the ability to stay removed from situations outside of their understanding remained. I had become an adult the day my father told me my life would end with my last heartbeat.

He was a believer of the body, that all that we were ever to be or become could be defined by four extremities and a thin covering of skin. He believed that that skin was the only canvas one needed; the only story that was worth being told. He was a man that would tell me about his scars every time he caught me staring at one for more than four seconds at a time, so eventually I became careful to only look for three. He never noticed the difference, because he never noticed things that he deemed trivial.

I, in myself, am a boy of trivial habits.

My father wakes up at sunrise, but never watches it. He says that it will be there tomorrow— but how does he have the confidence to say the same about himself? The sunrise may come but the end of our lives may break the horizon with it. Therefore, I have watched every sunrise I have been granted the privilege of existing concurrently with. He tells me that mornings are meant for productivity, that I am wasting what time I have left.

His breath nothing but hot air pressed to my skin I remind him that he is wasting his own time and breath by criticizing the way I have chosen to spend my first hours of consciousness.

He says nothing, goes back to his first bottle of the day, and watches me from across the kitchen table.

My father is not a man who believes in anything he cannot see, but I remember watching him pray by mother’s side the day she took her final breath. He had sent me away just as the morning sun had broken the horizon, had told me that for once I should watch the sunrise while he did something important with my mother. As a child for whom it was still acceptable to remain naïve, I had nodded my head with anticipation and scampered toward the window before stopping abruptly when a question crossed the battlefield of my mind.

“Dad, why—”

Train of thought trailing off I watched as my father knelt by my mother with his hands folded in prayer and his head bowed to rest against her side. Neither of my parents had ever taken the time to explain to me what it meant to believe in a greater being, but I knew this is what a true prayer was supposed to look like.

Now, if my father was to pray, I would not call him heroic as I had the day he intertwined his fingers with my mother’s while she died. No, now, I would call him a hypocrite. A sinner. I would call him by name but never associate my own with his.

The day after we had buried my mother, he stared at me from across the kitchen table and told me we had something important to discuss. I nodded my head in eager agreement, but asked if I could tell him about something I had discovered. His sigh of frustration was followed by a silence that was as much approval as I had needed, and I told him proudly that I had seen heaven beyond the sunrise that morning, and that I was sure Mom had gone there.

His fist heavy against the wooden table splintered words flew from his mouth and stuck in my skin like they were meant to be embedded there. “Goddammit, Oliver. People like us just don’t go to places like that.”

I knew then that my father was not a man of religion.

His mind a well overflowing from that day forward his own body betrayed him as he lost the ability to sit still. It began with pacing, with my own mimicking his behavior in my subconscious ventures on the nights he’d wander from the house and forget to lock the front door.

A son left alone to brave a night that was not supposed to be his monster to face.

When I began to mimic my father, I grew restless in the early hours of morning. I paced the long side of my room and the kitchen counter when I believed he was sound asleep. My miscalculations proved to be unfortunate for the both of us, for after months had passed and tensions had grown alongside the shriveling trust we had managed to keep his concern turned to rage as he threw an empty bottle at my feet when he saw me take a step to close to his own.

“You’re going to turn into me one day and I’ll be damned if that happens, Oliver.”

Confusion etched into the lines forming on my furrowed brow I stayed silent as his voice grew in volume.

“Do you want to know why I said we are not the type of people who would go to heaven if I truly even believed such a place existed?” He did not wait for an answer he already knew— one of my father’s only strengths. “Any man who has killed another and had the love of his life bear witness to it has no hope of ever going to anywhere but hell, or if I’m lucky, nowhere at all.”

The first step of turning into my father began when my heart began to burn red at the tinge of anger creeping along its edges.

“And you know what, Oliver? You’re going to end up just like me, one day.”

I took the bottle from his hand and let the rest of it burn my throat— a second step to regret.

“I’ll be damned.”

I suppose that was the idea.