skirmish Soma After mom died, the world kept spinning. I wonder how tired the world must be. Day in and day out the world has to watch people die, be born, get married, get divorced, and try and pretend everything is ok. It must be miserable being the world and never having a chance to mourn. All the world can do is watch and spin—spinning, spinning, spinning—all of its emotions away. I painted pictures of the world in hopes that I could give it some type of a voice. With a paintbrush in my hand, I gave the world tears in hopes that it would take enough time out of its busy spinning schedule to see that someone out there knew it needed a break too. I gave the sun arms to hold the world still, and I gave the moon a smile to make the world feel at peace. I placed these paintings carefully across my mother’s side of the bed —there was no more room on the refrigerator — and I really needed my dad to see that he could stop spinning too. After mom died, dad turned into a real man, or at least, that’s what everyone was saying. He stopped drinking. I guess that’s what makes a real man. A real man starts taking out the trash and picking up his daughter from school. A real man spends his days with a forced smile pretending that he’s not battling internally with his regret and sadness. So dad turned into a real man. After mom died, dad and I had to put on our happy family faces with a mourning twist. Distant relatives who saw my mother as nothing more than a drug addict would well up with insincere tears and polish the tarnished memories they had of her as a girl till they shone like awards. My father and I would smile and nod at our family’s poor attempts of comfort. I would have much rather heard the real stories my family had about my mother. The time they found out she was doing heroin. The time they found out she was sleeping around with some musician for free meals. The times my mother begged for help and everyone looked past her pain and stared her problems in the eye. These were the stories my mother would have wanted me to hear. Most of the time our family brought food, which was the only upside of their visits. Cousin Jess' brought apple pie, our great aunt Beckie brought beef stew, and Aunt Jim (once Uncle Jim but unintentionally renamed by a beloved child) brought my dad a 24 pack of beer. I watched my dad pour the sacred brown liquid into an ant hole one night. He squatted there under the moon and stared into the heart of the earth a thousand fathoms down, destroying the one thing I thought he truly loved. “Daddy?” I asked from the other side of the sliding glass door. “Hey,” he said, still focused on the steady flow of liquid. “Why are you doing that?” “I’m getting rid of the bad things,” he answered. “That means no more drinking.” “Like water?” I said. “No,” he said with a sad smile. “No more of this.” He held up one of the beer cans shaking it to prove his dedication. “But you love it,” I said. “Yeah,” he said. “I do.” It took me a few seconds to fully understand what he was saying to me, and to be honest to this day I don’t think I really know what he meant. But for once in his life I think he really meant it. “Daddy?” “Yeah?” “I think you might be hurting the ants,” I said. My father looked at me and started laughing. It felt like it had been such a long time since I had seen him laugh, and I forgot that his teeth were slightly crooked like mine. But his newfound smile soon faded, and he erupted into uncontrollable sobs. I didn’t go outside to be with him; instead, I watched how the beer cans crowded around him as if to say their farewells. It was almost as if they needed my father as much as he needed them. After mom died, we had to say goodbye. My father dressed me in a brand new black dress that was too tight, but I didn’t complain because he bought it for me all by himself. We drove in silence to the church that we knew nothing about, but it had pretty stained glass windows, so we had decided to have the funeral there. We sat in the front row of the church and listened as people we hardly knew cried about my mother’s sudden death, but I didn’t cry. I tried. I tried so hard to cry for my father, but the only time I came close to crying was out of frustration, not out of sorrow. “Barbara Lynne Roberts was a woman of great propriety,” the preacher whom I had never met said, with a practiced tone of mourning. “What is pro-pro-pro-pry-or-tea mean?” I asked my father in a hurried whisper. "Honestly,” my father said, more to the pine coffin in front of us than to me, “I have no idea.” “Why would he say Mom had property?” I said. “I don’t know,” my father said. “I bet it means that she was a good lady,” I said with a smile. My father nodded, and squeezed my shoulder with his calloused fingers as if to agree. After mom died, we had to hug our family. My father and I waited outside of the church as our strangers bombarded us with tearful hugs. My father, since he was a real man now, handled everything really well. He smiled and cried with people he couldn’t care less about. I respected him more in that moment than any other moment I can think of. But I didn’t cry. I didn’t hug. I stood behind my father’s legs and watched. "My dearest girl,” my Aunt Laura said, black mascara running down her flushed cheeks. “Come here, Honey.” “No.” “Please, come here and give me a hug,” she said, both of her shaking hands begging for mine. “No,” I said firmly. “Jerry, she’s not even crying,” she said to my father. My father looked down at my visibly dry face. “Go hug your Aunt Laura,” my father said, pushing me into her overweight arms. I waded in the fat of her embrace for what felt like hours as she wailed deeply over the loss of her sister. She finally let me go, but held my face, tracing my cheeks with her thumbs. “You are a beautiful girl,” she said. “Don’t you let this world get you down.” After Mom died, I finally cried. It wasn’t the world that got me down. It was the people that cried at my mother’s funeral and then went to Applebees to gossip about her drug addiction and what a horrible person she truly was. How the world was better off without her. I cried because they never asked the world how it felt. 240204 what's it to you? who go blather from