I Don’t Wanna Be Lucky
“If you’re lucky, you are going to outlive your parents,” they say
I once heard a man say, “if you’re lucky you are going to outlive your parents.” Well then, I don’t want to be lucky. It sounds selfish when it’s written, but even if they go someday, I just hope I am not here to see it, to feel it, to be hurt by it. I don’t want to ever have to miss them. I don’t want to ever have to miss him.
I don’t want to miss his subtle smile, his unwanted comments, his protective look, his spiritual advice, his angry lectures, his almost closed eyes when he refuses to stop watching me play guitar...
I don’t want to outlive my dad. But I wouldn’t say that I’d rather die to get away from it. I like to think that I am not a coward. That I don’t run when I see danger coming. However, I just wish there was somewhere I could hide, hide from my feelings, hide from the pain I don’t even know if I’m ever going to feel.
My mom was hurt by him once. She loved him and cried for him and because of him. She missed him when he went to his first day of work after five weeks of vacation. She wasn’t used to missing him, so she cried.
One day, she and my dad went to the doctor, who told them my dad had a 70% of chance of having cancer. She cried, because she thought she might have to miss him. She was scared so she cried, suffering for the pain she didn’t even know if she was ever going to feel.
My dad has only cried once, when he was a little kid. My grandma insisted it wasn’t anything, that everything was going to be okay. He lost a tooth. When my mom told her my dad’s prognostic, she said it wasn’t going to be anything. She smiled, hoping this way she would suppress the pain she didn’t even know if she was ever going to feel.
I wish in school they hadn’t taught me how to learn, how to find a way to know things. I wish they would teach me how to not know. But I guess nobody really knows that, so we try and try, until it finally seems to hurt less.
I am surrounded by people who try to believe in their own lies, pretending to see reasonableness in simulating they know how to not know. But I am a writer. My mom cries, my grandma smiles, and I write. They are just different ways of being scared of what you don’t know.
Originally published at http://lisraiss.wordpress.com on April 4, 2022.
