additional notes: second person pov, marriage troubles, arguments, childhood, flowery language, metaphors, very much a vent
summary: an exploration of you, your parents, and how life moves on after messy childhoods.
finished, 1/1 chapters, word count: 857
Your parents love each other. Even when you doubt it, even when all of you say divorce is inevitable, their lives are still intertwined and their love is still present. You deny this, of course, and in your head you plead that this love between them, the string and spit and glue keeping their lives joined together, falls apart once and for all. Thirty years, however, are not so easy to unbalance.
You don’t understand it and neither do your siblings, for that matter. You wish for their love to either sweeten or turn to acid. The world should either let them become kind and soft, lower their voice to honey sweet whispers, or it should rid itself of their love entirely. One or the other, you don’t understand why this limbo can’t cease to creep into your reality. Why must they argue like this? Why can’t they calm themselves? Why is their love so harsh and unforgiving? You cannot understand a fire from within the burning building.
Can’t they see that this love they share sours you? Every argument they have you must hear, you must pick a side. Your perception of them shatters like a glass, one that there is no avoiding cutting yourself on, only for you to always end up regretting your cursing of the shards when they piece themselves together and let you drink from them. How do you show love to something you know will hurt you again later? How can you sit and laugh with them when you have heard every threat of divorce?
They will tell you to stay out of their relationship but how can you when the walls are paper thin and hearing is unavoidable. You try to ignore it all, close the door and listen to music louder than you should, but closing your eyes doesn’t mean you suddenly aren’t in the eye of the storm. You want to scream. Can’t they see the crossfire they have caught you all in? Are they blind to the way their visceral rage chips away at your bonds with them? You try to be there, to spend time with them, but how can you when his raised voice makes you flinch, when their insults make you nauseous?
You love them in the ways that count but liking them is another matter entirely. Their words, their attitudes, they all scald you like a hot pan you never learned to stop touching. You care for them but it is never easy to. What are you to do? The only way forward is to do what your siblings did before you, what your brother will do after you. No matter how much it hurts to leave others behind, life beckons you onwards. Life tells you to leave the generals to their bombs, to turn tail and flee even if it feels cowardly.
You see, everyone needs to leave the burning building eventually. Call the firefighters, evacuate, let them figure it all out. You must grow up and move on and live the life you want to. You must get the help you deserve and then you will look at your parents’ fire and offer your loved ones the water-soft love that your parents poured out years ago. It is the only answer, the only solution where you do not become your father, where you do not become your mother.
Rebuilding is difficult but there is a life after this never ending war they have caught you in. Skies of ash will clear themselves of their pollution, infertile fields will once again bear wheat, and lost, crying, innocent children will find a home once more. This battle has shaped you, shaped the way you want to snarl before ever being vulnerable, shaped the way you hide yourself away from the world, but you are clay that has not been fired yet. You can still wet your hands and reshape your edges, soften the places where you cause others to bleed.
Every child’s greatest accomplishment is hidden in the ways that they differ from their parents. Every child’s greatest disappointment is visible in the ways that they can hear their parent’s voice coming from their mouth. Your parents’ love is softer than their parents’ was and yours will be even softer than that. One day you will wake up and realise that the venom you learned from your parents is no longer your first instinct. One day you will wake up and realise all the places your parents cracked and fixed themselves with the other’s love and you will finally understand it. One day you will not feel afraid to sit with them because they are once again people to you, war generals no more.
You will heal from the cuts that the shards of glass gave you once you no longer cradle the shards in your hands. Time heals all and the world has offered you nothing but time, if you're willing to take it. One day there will be a ceasefire and you will make peace with the aftermath. You will make sure to not be the cause of the next war.
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