A letter to the tallest man on earth:
You talk about living hell like we don't know what that is. You say you're stressed, you think it's hopeless, your heart is in pain.
How quaint, to suggest that you're suffering through any of this.
Living hell is when you hold your mom up while she bawls over a broken heart. Living hell is having the life ripped out from under you and the one who did it is standing there with it dangling from his hands, talking like you're the one to blame. Living hell is when the man who you thought could do no wrong, the one with all the answers, the tallest man on earth who taught you everything about money and God and cars and beer and work and travel and people and life is a liar and a fraud and a manipulative greedy spiteful son of a bitch.
Living hell is having to scrounge up an answer for your mother when she asks you at 1:30 in the morning why we weren't good enough for him.
I've asked myself the same question so many times.
You always pop up - never announced, never fanfare-ed, just 'pops up.' Like nothing has happened. Because to him nothing has happened. Everything's the same: we talk about the same things in the same clothes we wore before to the same jobs in the same places and we come home again to the same house with the same people and the same song-and-dance about love and devotion that doesn't mean jack fucking shit. Nothing's changed. Except it's like that iPhone 7 commercial: every goddamn thing has changed. In the house that was a home we have to calculate what we say like we interpret what we hear because what we don't immediate anticipate to be lies will be turned into an untruth to ease the pain of the man who started it all. Nothing simply said, nothing simply heard. Complications. What did you say? 'Semantics.'
You say we're having meatloaf, I get my spoon in preparation for chili.
You told me that a wise man said she's not my problem. My role is not to hold her together by the fraying seams, it's not my responsibility to pick up her pieces. Unluckily for you I read what that wise man really said, and it sounds a lot more like, 'it's between mom and dad and God.' He said nothing about being there for the one who's falling apart and so far that person hasn't been you. You seem incapable of change - the one who told me to constantly reevaluate myself to ensure constant growth. And so for now my relationship with you remains at the stalemate you've seen for the past month. I hope it's what you're ready for.
Then again I don't really give a fuck what you're ready for. We certainly weren't ready for the bombshell you got to launch from a comfortable million miles away.
You've been in Florida for a few days and it's been so nice knowing you won't 'pop in'. I'm actually dreading Thanksgiving this year and the thought that we might have to sit around a table together and pretend that everything's fine when we'd all rather being doing something - or in your case, someone - else. How will we handle Christmas because I don't know about the rest of them but I won't have gotten you anything. Maybe the empty cigarette packs that she's smokes over you. One for every time she's asked me why she wasn't enough for you.
Do not come home for Thanksgiving - this isn't a home anymore. You can pull that whole 'I'm here because my name is on the mortgage' card. Maybe the one about 'a man's home is his castle' again, that was a gem. No one in your kingdom wants to see you. And if you're the honorable 'king' you think you are, you'll honor your subjects' wishes.
I doubt you will, though. You'll do what you want. You always do. Why should this time be any different?
I hope you're getting the rest you were seeking in Florida. You certainly must be exhausted from your half-baked piss-poor attempts to make progress. Don't forget your sunscreen.
