I’ve never met him, but they say I have his eyes. Hearing this amuses me because the hue is constantly changing and it makes me wonder if his did the same. The majority of the time the iris is green with specks of gold outlined in charcoal. Often, strangers will tell me that I have the prettiest eyes they’ve ever seen, and my friends will tell me that I have an old soul (I suppose I equate the two since they say the eyes are the windows to the soul). A coal mining accident in West Virginia crushed the left side of his body, and I have chronic pain in my left hip before the age of thirty. Sure, it’s more than likely a coincidence, and I don’t necessarily believe in reincarnation, and seeing as how he died fourteen years prior to my birth — I don’t think that’s how reincarnation works anyway.
Twenty years after the coal mining accident, he had taken a liking to cheap liquor, and the cheap liquor had taken the obvious toll on his liver. My dad stood at the graveside in a haze. He barely saw the sodden earth, which now encompassed nothing more than a shell, a shell that became a faded memory, a faded memory barely passed on to me. The perfect rectangle of earth would soon decompose the man that created him, and part of the person that I am today. A lonely raindrop struck my dad’s forehead and, as he sank to his knees, the second storm came. He stayed there for a long time staring, as lifeless as his father, while the rain hit him harder. Drenched and alone, he finally stood up and forced himself to walk away. He had died on my dad’s sixteenth birthday. You can imagine how bad that would fuck someone up; even make them lose their mind. I get to look at pictures whenever I want, but I’ve never had the enjoyment of hearing many stories. I know he was a bad ass in the war and it makes me smile to think about his bravery, a bravery that helped him survive. I never got to sit on his lap and hear him tell me about his past while I stared into the windows of his soul, the windows he passed to me (I suppose that I see them every time I look into the mirror). I’ll never get a whiff of his cologne at random times in my life because I never got to know what it smelled like. I never got to see his old, tired hands or even hear his laugh. I never got a lot of things, but at least I got his eyes. Comments are closed.
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