we fear no god but each other

in a house with a father, his words become law and his actions blind faith

sacrifice of isaac - caravaggio

I have this recurring dream where you smash my face in. Over and over again, the blood splatters against the wall. My skin tears, my bones splinter, the sound of the crunch echoing throughout the house until there are no bones left to crush and I am just a stain on the wall. The dream ends. I open my eyes. The walls of my room are stained only with a botched paint job from the month I decided I wanted to be a painter, pristine white otherwise.

My mother sits with me in a parking lot near our house — just far enough away for the distance to feel real — and we play a game of telephone. He does it out of love, she repeats, but the words in my head translate to he does it out of fear. My mother says he doesn’t know if you love him and my heart pinches at the fact I understand. I think of how my father smiles at me across the dinner table and declares how he knows me better than my mother. I think of how someone once told me anger is a mask for grief or fear. I think of how people say I have my father’s face: if our masks are the same, I think I am grief and he is fear.

We walk home. My mother makes dinner, my father says nothing. We sit at the dinner table. My mother makes conversation, my father says nothing. After dinner, we go on a walk. My mother is busy, so the walk is silent. He takes me to his favorite park as a child and I listen to stories about his childhood in my head — all of them are in my mother’s voice, never his. I repeat the stories to him and he just nods as a way of verification. I tell the stories thinking I wanted to hear them in a voice that isn’t hers; my mother says the cadence of my voice was inherited from my father. The story still comes out two pitches too high.

I have this recurring dream where we are sitting on the bloodied floor of my room; there is a conversation we keep having in my head. You speak in words much kinder than I remember. You speak in words so kind I forget they are imaginary. There is an exercise I practice with my therapist where I say thank you and I accept your apology instead of it’s ok. There is an exercise I practice with my therapist where I don’t have to forgive anyone. In the dream, I forgive you. I wake up. The walls of my room are a calming grayish blue. The dream has ended; I still forgive you.

I am living in a city on the other side of the country and I call my mother to ask if the emotions I feel are hereditary. My father is on the line, too, but I don’t dare ask the same question. My mother once told me he was hard on me because he saw too much of himself in me. I think of all the times my father explained my outbursts to my mother, the look of arrogance on his face as I reluctantly admitted he was right. I try not to think about how much I hate looking in mirrors and how that fact makes me understand my father more. I think maybe recognition as a synonym for love goes both ways. When I echo the movements of my mother, I feel sorrow for her. When I echo the movements of my father, the sorrow is mine alone.

In a house more war than house, even soft hands become a knife. In a house far away from the first house, sharp things cannot find a way to evolve in reverse. I am a mouse caught under the wheel, crushed under the weight of a God it will never understand. My father caught a mouse in a glue trap, once. Its tiny claws clenched around a wire while my father tried to take the trap outside. I never saw my father as a gentle man, but when the mouse finally let go of the wire, he let the mouse run free outside. My mother tells me: he does it out of love, he doesn’t know if you love him, he just wants you to be able to survive in the outside world. I watch my father watch the mouse and see a reflection of myself in its eyes. My father takes me to his favorite park and listens to me tell his stories; my father says to me as we are leaving: I want you to be ok.

I have this recurring dream where I have to cry at your funeral. The coffin is being lowered and I have not felt anything in weeks. Dirt gets tossed over the wooden box and I still feel nothing. I go home and sit on the couch and I still feel nothing. The next day, I go back to work and I still feel nothing. The dream ends. I stand in front of a mirror and practice making sad faces. I try to force myself to cry. The face that looks back at me is yours.

I’m sorry I carried your corpse with me for so long. The blood reminds me I got to hold the knife; the blood on my hands is my own but it doesn't make it any less red.

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