The Unsolvable Equation

Thirty-eight: The Finale

Alexia remembered the first time she had asked her father to teach her to write poetry. He was drunk and disoriented and she was curious and stupid enough to discard her knowledge of social boundaries and pluck up the courage to ask him. Her father sat at their kitchen table, reeking of alcohol, and scribbling furiously into a tiny notebook on the table. She cautiously climbed up onto the chair next to him and peered over at his drunken scrawl. His words were scattered all over the paper, like lost travellers trying to find their way home, and Alexia wasn’t sure whether it was for artistic purposes of the results of too much alcohol and piled up emotions. She watched him rip the paper out and fling it onto the table top, and attack a fresh sheet. She watched him translate his black, burnt soul into the words on a page. She watched him dot the paper with unshed tears and fury take the shape of broken pencil leads and crushed balls of paper. All through this, he seemed oblivious to her and she, the invisible spectator. For once, Alexia began to appreciate her father’s ability to see through her as if she were thin air.

Then, he suddenly turned to her. “If you wanted to know what I was doing, just ask,” he slurred. “Don’t stand there staring at me, you’re making me uncomfortable.”

As if in some kind of trance, she was unable to reply, and could only stare up at him, with pleading eyes that did not belong to her and an innocence so out of character that even her father gave in to it. With a sigh, he picked up his book and shut it, turning to face her. “I am writing poetry,” he explained.

This she knew. “But you seem so much different from the other times.”

“That’s because I’m writing sad poetry.”

She looked at him. “Sad poetry?”

Her father sighed and opened the book again, staring at the words as if they played out a movie in front of his eyes. Later, she would find out that he had lost his job and had broken up with his lover. “Yes, sad poetry. Would you like to hear it?”

Alexia could hardly believe her ears. Her father never, ever, opened up his book of poems to her willingly, let alone offer to read them. Yes.

He grunted and a flipped a page.

For a long time happiness has evaded me,
the meaning of love a mystery

Alexia walked briskly through the corridors of the hospital, hardly daring to breathe. Every step she took felt like she were piercing her feet through needles and every tick of the clock felt like another countdown to death. She wasn’t sure of what happened and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. She just knew that something very bad had happened and she felt like she was hanging on a balance and every little move she made could tip the scale. She walked past nurses and doctors like they were flashes in a big nightmare and she paused at the door of a ward. Her hand fumbled with the doorknob and she froze, unwilling to accept the possibility of reality that laid behind that door. Go in, she urged herself. You can’t run from reality forever.

Through seas of people and broken dreams,
There was someone who drew me in

Alexia did not register the action of pushing open the door but somehow, she was in the ward, and she was staring at Caden’s sleeping form. He’s just sleeping, she told herself. He’ll be alright. Sleeping is normal, scientifically proven to be a routine of life. He’ll wake up in no time. She dared not take a step closer. But why is everyone so sad?

But repelled me as well, from the moment I knew
That we were different, unmatchable, me and you

Through the corner of her eye, she saw Caden’s mother rise to walk towards her. The older lady threw her arms around Alexia in an embrace that served only to well up the grief she had been trying so hard to push down. She couldn’t even bring herself to ask if Caden would be alright.