Life Happens | ONC 2024

Chapter 13

LEX

I'm lying on my squeaky couch with my mind on the future while my body is in the present.

@T.Lex: Hey, I need to talk to you.

@Lil.olive: Visiting my parents in the city for the holidays. I thought I told you?

She might have, now that I think about it. Still, I need to make things right with her. I felt guilty kissing Blanche, even if every cell in my body screamed at me to do it. I stood at a crossroads where Blanche already owns my heart. But it is considered cheating, because I am supposedly dating Olivia, even though we never had a talk about the stipulations of our relationship.

I owe her as much as the truth, though.

That's why I asked Blanche time to fix this. To end things with Olivia and at least explain myself.

@T.Lex: Ok, let me know when you're back.

I can't keep digging my head into the sand anymore and ostrich my way through life. I need to man up and face hard decisions head on. What an example would I be otherwise to my kid?

Right, I'm going to be a father.

As if that isn't the most frightening thing ever. Yet it draws a little smile on my lips if I think about it.

It doesn't scare me. Because I'm doing this together with the girl I've always loved. I only wish I could've done things differently, and to be by her side when she found out. It must have been really daunting for her to go through.

Growing up with alcoholics and other substance abusers, I've never had an example of a loving family until Blanche came along. Her mom was terminal when I met her on that bench at the hospital courtyard, and I had been beaten to a pulp by my own father.

While my father drank and dealt, my mother was ashamed of her addiction. Her hands used to shake at the kitchen table when she woke up from a bender and tried to do better. The tremor would only subside if she grabbed from the bottle again, so those mornings were a testament to her fighting her illness, but being weak to the influence of my father once he came home.

Everywhere in the house she would hide bottles. Empty ones. The shame of her actions was too hard to bear, so she would stash them away in cupboards, behind closets, under the sofa... but then the same bottle she hid out of guilt, would call out to her and force her to trample to the grocery store and buy more.

My father preferred her drunk, so she wouldn't protest about his own fucked up state. My mother depended on my father for everything, so if he hit me in one of his ragers, she would always talk about his actions as if they were the right thing to do.

There was a toxic co-dependency between the two and their addiction. Everything became a reason to find the happiness they'd lost at the bottom of a can of beer or a bottle of cheap wine. Job after job, my father lost, and he had to get creative.

The reason why he is rotting away in a prison cell for possession and selling.

In a nutshell, I would have preferred to never see either of them again, nor step foot in the house that hosted my nightmares for many years, even the current ones. But something kept gnawing at me after meeting with the social worker.

I bit the proverbial bullet and asked Blanche to accompany me to the center where my mother has been admitted for her Korsakoff syndrome treatment.

You know the saying: how time heals all wounds? It doesn't. It mellows, but it is never really gone.

I'm following the desk attendant to the wing where my mother is staying. Blanche walks next to me and I keep reaching for her. Her hand closes over mine and our eyes silently connect. It's all the support I need.