(Source: everythingyouaskme, via usualstuff)
He threw a glance her way. Something caught him off guard, although he couldn’t place his finger on it. Dylan kept walking, past the woman on the bench, with her strange expression, past the cluster of pretweens mastering the killing of time, and onto the next street. He was a little wary of this whole thing, but Dave managed to talk him into it. He searched the numbers on each unit and eventually came to the one he was looking for. The front door was chipped in the charming kind of way you would expect to see on an old postcard. He pushed on the slanted doorbell and waited, listening for sounds from inside.
The man who answered was a little shorter than he expected, his stout frame filling the doorway, making Dylan look even taller and lankier than usual. Dylan realized the man was waiting expectantly for him to speak.
“Hi,” he managed.
“Hello…” answered the man sceptically.
Dylan searched for himself in the brown eyes of the man in front of him. He had wondered for a long time how this meeting would happen, the time and place and the reactions of both of them. He forced himself to speak again.
“My name is Dylan Palmer.”
The look on the man’s face indicated this wasn’t too much of an explanation.
“Um, did you know a woman named Adriana Lawson?” Dylan continued.
This seemed to get the attention of the man in the doorway. Instantly he began to see the similarity. How could he not realize it before? The slight curl in his sandy hair, the tall frame and square jaw. Even his mannerisms suggested her presence. But what did this mean? Why would Adriana’s son be here wanting to talk to some ex-lover of his mother’s?
Dylan knew that he had to keep going ahead with this now that he started to talk.
“Adriana is my mother. I was born in 1989 and she has raised me by herself my whole life. Until recently, I didn’t know who my father was. And-“
“Why didn’t she tell me?” the man interjected. “Why didn’t she tell me I had a son?”
This was one question Dylan wasn’t expecting, and definitely one he didn’t have an answer for. He could only stare there stupidly, feeling slightly guilty for some reason.
A silence passed between them until the man stepped aside and told Dylan to come in. Dylan entered his father’s house for the first time, trying to take in every detail as if the choice of furniture or the array of shoes on the lopsided shoe rack could tell him anything significant about the kind of person his father was. As they proceeded into the living room he could hear the slow, winding creak of his father’s front door closing, a sound that would become familiar to him over the next coming years, a sound in which it seems absurd to imagine a time in his life where it didn’t exist for him.
Soon I will feel it,
Touch it and taste it.
Soon I will know it,
And memorize
Its diction and syntax
And metaphors entirely.
Soon I will be free.Soon I will let go,
Understand that
I’ve chained myself
To a burning door.
Soon I will move away,
Far from the hole
I’ve occupied for years,
That…