Broken Homes

A snow flake falls. The freeze sets in. The heart turns cold, unable to express it's constricting thoughts, unable to beat again.

The night lays heavy on two families at war. They fight with one another, once friends from before. The clock ticks on in the silence. Time moves ever on. All souls tormented, even when the light shines, they never really meet the dawn.

Death lays it's nimble fingers on these two homes. It sneaks and snakes through the cracks made of concrete and stone. The death of a daughter resonates for those  immediate and those known as step. Peculiar she was with a grin beyond her era, a smirk, a laugh, it reminds me of a dancing chime. A smile that withers a mother's rosy completion and has frozen her sense of time. I, myself, remember in that moment as the wind swept back her hair. The new family gathers for pictures, but we just sit back and stare. She smiles a sad smile and looks off into the crowd. I sat there beside her feeling a sense of foreboding, it came to me clear and loud and with no hint of warning. She was not long for this world. I knew it in that instant. Time soon told us all the same truth, no matter how hard we resisted. Her smile and her peculiar laugh I will always remember, though we were never close. This way is much better, that the memory of her last moments that sometimes try to impose. The past is the present and the future is the past. The cycle will never end, even now this cycle seems sealed. What once was, now hardly seems real.

A father sits back on his throne made of sticks. Two families dance around him and he tries to turn sticks into bricks. He lives in a house, a small castle so lavish. All the trappings of wealth that he has earned and provided.  He is a man divided, between his vision and his past. The sins of his father have come home to roost at last. He was abandoned, or so the story goes. And just as he was abandoned, he left one family thay he made,  for another that he chose. It might not be his fault, for he is seeking his bliss. The cost is high and illusional, like gold, when touched, that turns to mist. The burden of a daughter, dead and gone, the agony of a wife and mother who tries to hold on, pulls him one way. A wife mistreated and abandoned, with two sons, pulls him the other way. What is a man to do when he, himself, is divided? Man or boy? Boy or man? Neither one whole. Neither one united.

Nearby, a young man sends smoke rings into the night. The smell of alcohol wafts off him as he tells me his plight. His anger and sadness is all that he knows. For years he has been at their whim, thrown back and forth in its throes. Depression is his friend, a herbal substance is his ally. One eases his his pain, the other brings it back but never goes on by. He lives in a house, one which the father abandoned. The stain of that night is like the tattoos on his arm which he has branded. The son and the father stayed close for a time. Two birds of a feather, inseparable through the tough times. He worshiped his father like a god way up high. He loved another man's daughter like a sister, though she was not grown from his home. They were also inseparable, they could not leave one another alone. He comes to me now, pain laid bare. He misses his sister, and has yet to accept that the world is hardly fair. He rages at his father. He calls him cheater and scum. Little does he realize with every passing day they become one. The father left him and his family you see. I fear he will never move on, he is stuck in darkness, he can not see. As I listen to his pain and offer empathy where I can, I wish he would put down the bottle and begin to think like a man. Life is pain, and pain is life. We can not grow of we never experience strife. There is still light in him, for he wishes to be different than the one that left him, I see. I hope he can find his way out of the darkness, but until then, in the nighttime with him I will be. I tell him I love him, and so does his grandma and mom. We are the family he should look to, not the one who is gone. I hope one of us can reach him, sooner rather than later. What I would not give to ease his burdens  and build him up, and make him greater.

I sit here in the darkness, in the house that's been abandoned. I fight my own demons, those in the past and in the present. I think of the two houses with ties made of branches that are broken and bent. The cracks still show, and fighting them makes me spent. I've accepted a lot,  and lived with my own pain that makes any harm seem minuscule. Some was of my own making, some others forced upon me, but we are one now, every experience and every cell make shape me into who I'm suppose to be. I push forward and look back, sometimes feeling like a fool. I have the love of a family divided and a woman that's a treasure. I wish I could give my family peace and contentment, but not at fate's leisure.