Parents are forgotten gods. My first act of worship was not a prayer but irrevocable love for my parents. It was easy to cast parents as gods when they were your eyes to a new life. The slow movement of your mouth as your teeth grind food, the small steps that you take confidently in a stride now, the smile that goes too wide because there is no shame in showing a moment of joy: all of my parents’ teachings live through me. I was their New Testament, their Vedas, their Torah, and so were they to me. Their voices wrestled in my head at every decision. What would my parents do? In moments of fear, I reached for the safe blanket of parental security to take cover in. Their ideas seemed so big and inconceivable. My inexperience ascended them to the pedestal of gods. I sought their blessing as earnestly as any believer. Heaven was the small smile of approval. Hell was the disappointment concealed behind indifference. It was important to maintain this balance, albeit impossible; my brain found ways to convert their fallibility into erased memories.
The moment the police knocked at our door, my dad was the one to open it, and since then, silence reigned in the house. The sound of the door closing never echoed in the hallway. When I first heard the reason behind my dad’s arrest, I immediately scoffed. They must have gotten the wrong man, I thought. Many men looked like my dad. Not even a seed of doubt sprouted in the arid mountain of my unshakable faith. When whispers about the news circulated amongst my peers at school, I felt a vehement urge to admonish the gossipers. They didn’t know my dad. Their little minds couldn’t comprehend the greatness of his soul, the goodness of it. When I thought of my dad, I thought of late-night whispered secrets as he tucked me into bed. His presence was immense, and so it was easy to let my deepest thoughts escape my mouth, for I knew that his grandeur would allow him to understand where my insecurities and worries stemmed from, finding the right words to thaw them out.
It was easy to reinvent a person and believe within your soul that they could be capable of such an act. However, when you had a lifetime’s knowledge of the person, it was impossible for your brain to reinvent them without being contradicted by the church of memories that you had built for them in your heart. The days went by as the whispers grew louder, and like the serpent’s, they held some truth to them. Yet I remained unshakable. I took the habit of bringing my wooden figurine with me to school, for that’s where temptation is the loudest. At home, my mother had become a ghost of herself; she kept to her routine, but her voice vanished along with the house’s.
On my eleventh birthday, my father took my palm and placed the weight of the world in it, “a symbol of childhood and innocence,” he said. It was a wooden figurine of me. He wished I would hold onto that innocence for longer. Now, I held onto that figurine like one would with a cross. The heavy weight of it in my pocket was both daunting and reassuring.
The day of the prosecution came, and I wasn’t allowed to attend, too young, they said. They made a mistake. If they had let me in, I could’ve convinced the judge of the goodness of his soul. I might not have had St. Michael’s scales, but I knew him all my life. I would’ve told him that such tender arms, the same ones that picked me up when I fell asleep in the car after a road trip, would never commit a sin. For how could a god be sinful? And if my father was as violent as they claimed him to be, wasn’t he God’s own creation? Wasn’t it God who preferred Abel’s killing over Cain’s fruit? Wasn’t it natural for violence to be an act of God?
God was sinless, and so was my father.
Months passed, and new little carvings appeared on the figurine as my nails kept scraping the wood with frantic disbelief. The pictures in the newspaper were hard to ignore. The foundations of the church I built for my father in my heart started crumbling. My brain started reinventing, no, remembering. The small bouts of violence that I had brushed off as temper, when my father’s fist would connect with a perfectly arranged dinner, sending the plates soaring for a minute, and as they landed, their clanking ordered silence into the room, followed by awkward coughs and a return to normalcy. But my eyes were forever seeing, even behind the veil of blind faith. These moments cascaded in my brain like a waterfall that had long dried up and finally experienced its first rain. I started piecing them together: the small shards of porcelain stuck between the wood planks, the angry ring-shaped mark on my mother’s cheek, the wall dents. It was all there, recorded in my brain, waiting for my heart to accept, for the veil of blind faith and the blissful safety of a story that my heart had convinced me of to find a fallacy. A plot hole. I was great at spotting them. When my dad tried to lull me to sleep with fairy tales, I would always meet him with questions: How did the prince not recognize Cinderella’s face? Why did Ariel so readily give up her voice? My father’s eyes would always dim when faced with doubt. “That’s how the story goes,” he would say softly, but with finality in his voice. Perhaps that’s how I started to accept things so readily, ignoring the plot holes in the stories I reconstructed, that others told, that my father told.
My father was a liar, and so was I.
Had I not deceived myself with a fairy tale of my own craft, like my father did when he convinced me of his tenderness? At the thought, my heart flipped and wrenched, agonizing over the fallacy of the statement. It was a paradox that ate at me from the inside. My father had been warm and kind; denying it would be another lie, another rewritten story to ease the way for hatred. I grieved turning my heart away. But his soul was corrupt and vicious. I had a hard time living with this dichotomy. It was easy to accept the goodness of my father and see it as my own, but the potential for violence would always be looming over my life. In the mornings, I avoided mirrors. They projected my father’s reflection instead of mine. Our features blurred together like the convergence of two clouds, and I found it hard to distinguish his eyes from my own. Had they always concealed a shadow of cruelty? Would I spend the rest of my life converting their similarities into sins?
My father inherited Cain’s sin, and so will I. How could I escape the oldest story in the world?
Escaping would take stripping the flesh from the bone, exhuming old doctrines and burning them to the ground, apostatizing from the religion of a fallen god. My will was too feeble, but for the first time, a prayer formed in the crux of my heart, a prayer that wasn’t to any god but to the fabric of my soul, asking that the mark she surely branded would stay concealed as long as she wandered on this earth.
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