That Day...

It was a gloomy, grey day....I had to wake up and face the hardest moments of my life. I don't know, maybe the sun was shining, maybe it was bright, but my memories of it are grey and dark. I didn't know what to expect, I tried to grasp at memories of our last call. Two nights before that day I had just learned he called some random friend of my mothers, and in his drunken state he swore someone was feeding me lies about his obvious addiction. He screamed at her to tell him who was lying to me about his obsession with drinking.

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I can't remember our last call, but I remember the last time I saw him. The last time my kids spent time with him, I dropped them off that summer, 2017. They spent two weeks at his apartment with my mom. His last words to me were "Fuck you, you don't want to talk to me? Then, FUCK YOU". Driving away I remember feeling hopeless, and if it weren't for my mom begging me to let the kids stay I would have never allowed it. But I did and I'm glad I did. It was their last time with him. Now I looked in the mirror not knowing what was to come and never expecting to have the strength to face whatever it was that was left of him. I thought I would break. There I was wanting so desperately to remember our last call... our last real conversation, but the fact was it was so long ago, I would spend the rest of my life trying to remember. It was over. I had to clean him up. Who would clean me up?

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I walked to the door, my uncle was already there... or was he? It wasn't important. Somehow I went in and stood by the bathroom. His flesh, organs and blood pooled in the corner, lining the bathtub....his underwear, dried, dark maroon stains on it. Somehow I saw the ghost of his body convulsing; him sitting on the toilet, throwing up his liver everywhere, projectile vomiting pieces of dark matter onto the bathroom mirror, landing on the walls as if he tried to hold in his vomit while attempting to make it inside the toilet bowl. I saw him fail, fall, blood coming from every orifice of his body... naked, trying desperately to free himself of his clothes and finally giving up on the floor.... ON THE FLOOR ALONE for 3 days- until the smell got bad enough for the cops to break in and take his decomposing body away.

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I looked at the floor holding my breath, behind a mask, and saw a piece of his scalp, with wet dark hair attached; pores big and obvious. That image stays with me, it was the last time I saw him. My cousin working through it, holding me strong, helping me hose down the dried up blood and black matter to clean him off the walls. I'll never forget that day, it has defined who I am now. I can't remember my last real conversation with him when he was sober not matter how much I search for the memory. That night, after it was done, I took a shower and looked in the mirror again, and knew it would never come back to me, my father was gone and forever I would reach into the pits of my memory for our last "I love you" to no avail, but I will never forget that day, the day I cleaned my father off the bathroom floor.