by blankbuk

Created on: September 08, 2009

Nothing is always as it appears to be.

She remembered reading that line somewhere in some nameless book she'd already forgotten. It rang true at that time simply because the plot had been about secrets and murder and mysteries unsolved. But she never believed it would be something so profound that she would start hearing its whispers in her life.

When her mother cried at night while father slept in a different room, all she saw was a sad lonely woman. She didn't see the sad smiles her father sent her way when she wasn't looking. She didn't know about the many times he'd stood by their living room door and just watched her laugh at the silly cartoons on television. She didn't hear his own sobbing when he finally told her mother that he had to leave.

So when her father left, all she saw was a man leaving his family behind and nothing more. In the many months he had left, her mother would always answer the phone expecting to hear his voice. When she got home from school, her mother would always be waiting by the door as if she were expecting someone else to walk through. As a child she never realized that mother never asked father to stay.

It was almost a decade later after burying her mother and going through her box of old letters that it finally become clear to her. Father wasn't her father after all, and even though he loved her and her mother, his own heart had been breaking when he realized she wasn't his own.

She was grown up enough now to realize that love isn't enough to keep people together. It needed trust and honesty and so many little things more that her parents apparently didn't have. She was old enough now to understand that he had had to think of himself and in a roundabout way he had also been thinking of her too.

Looking back she was glad he never showed himself again. She would have blamed him for a lot of things he wasn't even responsible for. She would have shouted words she didn't mean and he would have just taken it like the honest to goodness man that he was.

And when her father's ashes were finally handed to her, she knew the perfect place for him. He would be buried next to her mother where he always belonged. Beside the woman he had loved in both the before and after.

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