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Suspended Animation

April Blair


It was hard being the girl with the dead daddy.
The key was learning the proper way to set your poker face.

Offered an opportunity to say goodbye,
I said nah, it’s not my thing.
I’ve got art and music and magazines,
Saying goodbye to dead things I did not have time for.

Instead I took the straight-up class act:
I started counting the minutes,
The days, the months, the years and decades.
I counted each moment that passed post daddy’s death.
My life was narrated by that inscription
As if I was counting the months of a toddler’s age.

First fling? 1 month 1 day sans the angry patriarch.
High school graduation? 4 years and 2 million forced smiles after daddy took his last sorry breath.
First marriage? 8 years, 5 months, and a thousand swallowed tears after the old man ate it.
Divorce? 13 years and 60 million lies to myself post-daddy-dead.

I was in suspended animation.
Frozen in time like cryotherapy.
He stopped breathing in the living room and I stopped living -
Sold it off for pennies, poker face, and really cool sunglasses.
Conversations – loud - about God, the devil, the meaning of life,
And the meaning of death
If it had any.

The silence permeated even so.
Like the stench of my dad’s vomit on the old couch he slept on.

19 years and countless painful memories
Stories I never got to tell
Because a dead daddy simply could not be borne.

There are people in some places,
In different worlds, alternate dimensions, in photographs,
People who told the truth to themselves, with earnest.
I missed that lesson in the textbook.

20 years, 4 months, and 6 days after
I became the 14-year-old grieving girl with the dead daddy,
I took my first breath and started again, at zero.
It came out at first, choking, strange, but with it in chunks
Jagged little pieces and ugly yellowed strips of paper:
The truth of all the things
A young girl could not stand to bear –
Me, in summation.

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