It was just like Vancouver, so unstable is everything! For five days straight, there were golden mornings and glowing afternoons, then, when Saturday crept up the celestial day planner, the sky face lifted to gray and drizzling. If this weather change was actually viewed with thought may be it'd seem almost shocking.
It wasn't really cold, but looked like it. Mom occupied herself in the kitchen, doing what really wasn't necessary. Oddly enough, although she was always standing there, doing all the "somethings", the place always managed to still look like a mess. No one in this house ever wanted to cook anymore either, so we just scrounged around, digging up whatever there was to fill our stomach. It doesn't matter anyway, everything, even good things, tastes like cardboard these days. My father blamed my mother for her poor cooking. I just blamed the weather.
I sat, dull-eyed, at the "dining" table, staring at some dried carnation that hung so peculiarly from that wall lamp that vainly attempted to impersonate an old fashioned streetlight (too bad streetlights weren't that synthetic, bleached white). I shrugged it off as I know Mom had a strange preference of decoration. I mean, the powder pink that stained nearly ever wall of this house was her idea. Sometimes, it came to a point where I just want to scratch relentlessly those colors, or take a permanent marker and scribble curse words all over it, or draw grotesque bleeding figures on it. But not this morning, I sat there idly...food brought to my mouth like a robotic twitch, in fact I hardly knew what it was that I ate. Dad came through the door from his errands, and also took a seat beside me without a word. He started to scoop the food into his mouth, eyes glazed over and troubled with wrinkles of worry. I could scarcely feel his presence if not for his physical form sitting next to me, reflecting my own action of shoveling feed into a muzzle. I continued to daze disapprovingly into that hideous, dried carnation, and he continued to glaze over into his troubles. At length, mom came in, settled down a bowl of some sort of leftovers from last night. It struck me that food didn't look like food anymore (of course not, it was mom's cooking!). That thought didn't linger. Mom stuffed a spoonful in her mouth and glanced at dad, asked him about his errands casually, almost callously. Dad didn't look at her, but answered her in monosyllabic words. She seemed annoyed and proceeded to yell at him, something that we were all accustomed to by now. Dad merely blinked, didn't even bother to retaliate this time around, and let the silence respond to her.
He finished eating, and pushed his bowl aside nonchalantly. I could see him looking at me, then at my book. "What the hell are you reading?" "It's just a book dad." I replied, an imitation of boredom. "What, you can't even tell me that much now? How many times do you actually speak to your family in a week? You've changed you know?" (gee dad, you mean people change?). I rolled my eyes like I always do when he went off like that; a mad ejaculation of rhetorical questions. What ever I say really, is just going to be used against me in the near future, or in my mother's case, the distant too. My drunken God, it's like a freaking courthouse, and he blames me for not talking to him. Whoever invented the term "catch twenty-two" must know what I'm thinking right now. "There'd better be educational value in that." He grunted at last, bulging his blood-shot eyes at an invisible spot across the room. "Okay then..." I remarked to myself ever so snidely, and took note to never read anything of "value" again.
So this is what the world's nuclear families are suppose to be like? Or is that just mine that feels like a slow devolution? Every cursed day, the pink gets to me a little more, the carnations a little dryer. I usually lock myself up in my room and hope no one will come in, or try to make conversation outside the shut piece of rotting bark. Like I always said, all I need in here is a toilet and maybe a little hole through which food may be passed through in a versatile plastic package (and later a knife inside the bread). Come to think of it, it's like a luxury prison of some sort isn't it? I'd be bitter if I said this, but well, I can't deny that fact: I like being in this luxury prison, absolutely secluded from social disruptions, nursing that misanthropic mind of mine, enjoying the languid decay of solitude. Every time I open the door to go outside, which is like once a day, I was told that a vapid and usually stale odor emanates from my niche like the suppressed soul of some long dead orphan child rotting away. How descriptive eh?!