My first memory was of my father attempting to kill my Mother. He's dead now, so he must have met whatever was coming to him. He died of a Covid virus infection, much to my surprise, as I never think of parents as getting so much older.

The travels, the hotels, the lost friendships I kept strewing about as I do now. Nothing became clear to me until I left home at age 13. Everything changed when I became aware that I was no longer a child, but a teenager. 

Father was quite the Mama's Boy, but also a mean alcoholic. Mother didn't look for help for her Schizophrenia, so she beat me up with a baseball bat and somehow expected me to figure out which figure to look up to. I had to invent myself, and I did.

Women? Neurotics whose countdown to old age makes them desperate. Men? The dogs I expected. Both marked me and defined me. 

Their day was my night. That initial emotional scar made me aware of how I interact with my professionals; the social workers and my psychiatrist; my lovers and the friends I threw away. 

A small light of Hope is ahead. May I finally lay to rest my self-hatred for being small and not being capable of helping Mum; for leaving the younger sister I could not take with me; for burning the dried branch of this tree in a symbolic gesture to leave all of us behind to rise from ashes.

 This work by Orlando Barahona is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.