A Surreal Short Story
It’s been years since I’ve seen or spoken to my father. Unfortunately, cutting that tie resulted in the entire fabric of my family being ripped apart, torn from my emotional body. There was one thread that hurt much more than others, one thread that had me in disbelief: the thread with my cousin. We were best friends, we grew up together. But in my fathers desperation for control and monitoring after I severed his tie, he used my favorite thread.
Since I cut the tie with my father, the most I see of him has been in dreams. Sometimes they’re filled with spies under his control, often I’m running or hiding, sometimes I fight back.
Years after the cord cutting, my father landed himself in jail, which was a shock. I never found out why, just the fact of him being in jail was already much for me to process. Despite the shock, it did serve a personal purpose. I felt safer, even though I still dealt with fears, anxieties, and sometimes paranoia of being found by him.
Somewhat more recently, in a state of life changes, I found myself in a new neighborhood. It felt like a positive direction, even if something felt a bit “off.” It eventually became clear why something didn’t sit right with me. It turned out that my favorite thread, my cousin, started living on my street. It became sort of unavoidable seeing her around. I tried to stay in my own space, remain unnoticed, avoid the thread I had to sever, even though it was one I would’ve wanted to keep. We didn’t speak, but I would see her often, becoming emotionally disoriented by our proximity. I’d feel the pangs of knowing she had grown a family I’d never gotten to know, the confusion of her living in my city, and further, my own street. It felt like a cosmic joke played on me. But that wasn’t even the worst of it.
The days filled with my cousin’s face blurred together. In scattered scenes and jumbled emotions, it was like I was lost in a dreamlike state of longing and confusion, until the day someone opened the door to my house. It was my father. Unknown to me, my father had been released from jail. I fell into some sort of pattern, it was if my will just moved out of the way.
His presence felt normal, like it was never out of place for him to live in the same space as me. As my father came further inside, my own house started shifting and morphing. It was becoming my childhood home. I could see the details of the paint, the windows, every detail was a dizzy morphing combination, becoming more and more like the house I grew up in. I felt as if I needed to get out of pathways he might take to get to his bedroom, the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom.
Somewhere inside of me I felt that something had changed, but what was it? Dad had come home from jail, that’s all it was. It was so strange that he was in jail at all. I must’ve just gotten confused or disoriented. While he was gone, I stayed in the house alone. I probably just got used to having the house to myself. Even looking outside, it’s the same old neighborhood in the same old town I grew up in. Some details seemed a bit odd, but also familiar, the home I’d come from, the home I’d always had.