is there another knowing besides this remembering?

My new roommate Sara and I are sleeping in our beds,
Tucked in by Jose Quervos.
There’s an array of over filled black trash bags, limes, miller glass bottles
And other surprises from our party.
It’s maybe 2pm when the banging sound brings me to consciousness
and Sara shaking my body.
Shaking in a side-to-side fashion
that with the help of my mattress feels like a ship and I am seriously seaside.
“There’s some guy at the door. I can’t tell if it’s your dad.”
I immediately sit up. I find my black phone embedded in my impression of the blanket. One missed call. Dad.
Actually it doesn’t say that, I never saved his name in my phone it actually just says 338.1442. But in my brain that still says Dad.
I stumble toward the front room and try to find a blanket
To cover the fact that I’m not wearing a bra.
Sara goes back to her room and closes the door.
She’s really uncomfortable with my dad.
I can’t blame her. I’m uncomfortable with my dad.
Sometimes I wonder what my life looks like in her eyes.
She first met him as we stood on the out bounds of the
American Airlines platform in O’Hare.
Our suitcases were still filled with San Diego air
Our lighthearted conversation was strangled in the car ride home with him.
Our car circled the ramp of the airport two times,
Before I found the courage to point it out to him.
“I’m a professional driver. I do this for a fucking living alright.”
I swear Sara was gripping her seatbelt ‘till we got to her door.
I couldn’t even look at her to say goodbye.
My head was heavy with embarrassment.

Well there I found myself sitting in the teal plaid loveseat across from him.
He looked awkward in Sara’s great grandmother’s chair,
That had worn from age into a strange fixed posture.
I’m trying to focus on the dirty carpet
as he begins to pull things from the two brown paper Jewel bags in front of him.
I hear him talking but my eyes are focused on the ground,
trying to decipher if it is me not completely comprehending what he is saying
or if it is him that isn’t making any sense.
He pulls one lime, a loaf of French bread,
And a bag of frozen white fish from his feet.
“You cook ‘em at 350 in the oven. Ya know you get yourself a pan, maybe some tin foil, Wrap ‘em up. Real easy you know.”
I look up and focus on him for the first time.
He had repeated this sentence, right? I look to the direction of Sara’s room wondering if she’s listening and thinking the same thing.
All the sudden my hangover is being replaced with anger making me warm.
I try and think of a time when the child and adult boundaries where obvious.

And I see myself around two or three.

I’m at the foot of their bed.
Mom’s not there, just dad looking at me the way he always has,
Like he has no idea how to deal with me.
“Never got that book on how to be a father.”
My skin is warm and I look up at him like he is my tree of wisdom.
Everything feels like it’s slightly tilted like standing in the mist of a carousel.
“Here”
A little pill is placed in my hand. It’s yellow and red just like the top of my carousel.
I obediently put it directly in my mouth and begin to chew.
An unwelcomed taste spreads from the back molars, to the outskirts of my tongue before invading my entire mouth. My nose scrunches and I let out a small protest before swallowing the last bits only to have the taste linger long after the remains.
“Don’t chew it!”
He’s irritated. I begin to cry. He tosses the bottle on the dresser.
“Lay down and stay in here.”
I press my small body in the center of their king bed. Covered up to my nose. I peer at him as he closes the door. I hear unfamiliar voices and music begin to play.
But he told me to lay here. So I laid.
And the voices continue to rise and fall, until I start to wonder if my mom is out there. I want to tell her that I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to chew the pill and that I got yelled at again. I crawl across faded blue blanket straight towards the door.
He told me to stay in here.
I press my forehead against the white door and lay on my stomach. With my head near the crack all I can see are the very bottoms of shoes moving. I can’t tell which ones are dads or which ones are moms. I begin to push my fingers under the door wriggling for mom to come back. Even dad to come back. Just come back.
The door pushed me back to the wall and my head immediately hurts.
Actually I can’t tell if I’m crying because my head hurts or because the noise of the door on my skull sounded like it should really hurt.
“What are you doing behind the door”?

Now he’s in my apartment with his hand on the door.

“There’s someone outside, I gotta tell ‘em something. Hang on.”
He says this with a smirk and stands abruptly. Strangely. Like he’s new
To his feet. I’m baffled as he’s outside. Someone in his car?
So he proceeded to get completely drunk relatively early considering it’s about 2:17pm and opened his fridge and thought, what can I bring my daughter Nicole?
What should I place in a bag that’s worthy of a forty minute drive into the city?
A fucking lime? I feel like it’s some sort of strange joke on me and all the tequila I drank last night. I rarely drink anymore but last night I felt inclined to join the parade of people throughout my living room, hallway and kitchen space. I didn’t know most of them, and honestly didn’t care to. I positioned myself at the counter for the majority of the night. Issuing tequila shots I would call them, but half red plastic cups of tequila are not technically a shot.
“It tastes like shit anyways.” I said as I sprinkled salt into the air and handed the cup to the small group of guys that had accumulated around me, you might as well get drunk fast was my logic.

I can see me pouring myself what I would call a screwdriver when I was a sophomore after my homecoming dance. Standing at the counter in some kid I don’t remembers kitchen. About 3/4 horribly cheap might as well be rubbing alcohol vodka to the rest orange juice. I was unaware anyone was watching me as I placed the glass rim to my lips and drank a good portion before realizing the vodka bottle and I were not the only people in the room. Francis looked at me laughing saying something to his date that I drank like an alcoholic, but in that high school ass backwards sort of way where he thought it was cool to see a girl drink like she really needed it. The same way you’re cool when you don’t do your homework or show up for class. Yeah I was cool in high school and I didn’t graduate on time either. Really fucking cool when all the rest of my friends left for college only to leave me in the place I had come to hate the most. Home. Funny on life’s part, I think. I feel like it’s laughing at me sometimes.

When he came back in, he fell harder into the chair then he intended to.
But tried to continue like we both didn’t notice.
We always pretend not to notice.
Growing up the sheet of denial has been so thick. Enough that I can only look back now and realize that things could have been different if anyone spoke up.