7

“I'll be always there for you."

 

This is what my father, lying on his side in bed, told me with a voice broken by blood-red saliva, in exchange for a sip of whisky.

And so, like a dog with a stick thrown by the owner, I ran to retrieve the bottle that Mom had hidden, a stupid back-and-forth game, with the only purpose of deluding myself that when I came back he would be there, forever.

 

He was the only one to dream with me; the only one who would ever take me on his broad shoulders and, walking on the arid Australian soil, make me feel like a princess on her white horse; the only one who told me never to stop dreaming, because imagination is the only thing that makes you fly high and that no one can take away from you.

 

He was daydreaming as much as I was, more than I was.

 

So, running to get him the bottle for a sip of that poison, meant cementing a pact between dreamers. It didn't matter if I was helping him to kill himself because that promise "I’ll be always there for you", would be stronger than alcohol, illness, and loneliness.

 

"I’ll be always there for you”, I repeated to myself, while waiting for his return from work, inventing stories for my little sisters, helping my mother increasingly crushed by depression, forced to live isolated from the world with her daughters because of a husband unable to keep his job at the bank, more interested in gambling and getting drunk, and, therefore, demoted to run a small branch in a remote town in the middle of nowhere.

 

I was dreaming. I was dreaming of this decent bank director, maybe a little clumsy, perhaps a little too strict and detached to spend time with his children.

But my dreams did not change the reality of a father who was late to return home, lost in the arms of some woman who didn’t demand anything from him but his money.

"I’ll be always there for you", I repeated to myself, sitting on the porch steps, certain that he would arrive on a white horse to take me away from that life made of dust, damp and suffocating wind.

 

But a promise is a promise and must be kept, even when his request for whiskey was made in what was now a twisted version of his beautiful voice.

 

There is no harm in dreaming, and so I flew high with my imagination, certain that, sooner or later, she would come to take me away from that place.

 

"I'll be always there for you", I repeated to myself, as I watched him struggle to be less and less a father.

...

Extract from the book “We Cannot Escape from Ourselves”.