When I call now,
I don’t think he knows who I am.
He pretends
to have a conversation with me,
but I can tell,
he is faking it.
“What are you doing?”
I ask.
“Answering the phone,” he says.
He always says answering the phone.
Then he carries the phone
with the long cord
over to my mother.
“Who is it?” she asks him.
“I don’t know. A boy,
maybe.” he says.
“A boy?”
When I hear him say this,
my heart sinks into my stomach
because I really thought he knew he was speaking to me.
He didn’t.
He was faking and I believed him.
He’s good at faking.
He’s been doing it all his life.
Always smiling and charming
while valium raged inside him.
Nobody knew.
Nobody knew the anxiety that pulsed beneath his veins
or the anger
that sent him storming down the hall.
Nobody knew
but me.
Now, he wakes up in the morning,
and sits on the edge of the bed
and wonders where his clothes are.
Sometimes,
he’ll put his pajamas back on
to go down for breakfast in the dining room.
“What difference does it make?” he’ll say.
“Pajama, shirt, it’s all the same.”
I try to explain to him there’s a difference.
But he tells me I’m “talking nonsense.”
I guess I am.
What difference does it make?
Now that words have lost their meaning
and faces are slowly becoming blank canvases to him.
Even mine.
