I stopped in front of the entrance to my apartment, as I had done thousands of times, and then the pain in my head totally disappeared. I have the feeling that saddened me slightly. The strange gave way to the mundane. “Was there even anything there?” I thought. “Or is this some psychological mechanism for coping with the sensory deprivation, caused by staring at monitors all day?”
Pretty soon, I was having dinner with my mother (yes, I still live with my parents, I know, veeeery funny). She asked me how did my day go, and I tried to structure the story that I had just experienced in a way that would’t make the story sound made up.
{.note} you are most unable to take notes, at the precise time when it is most appropriate for you to make notes.
She responded with a well-executed silence (I don’t know why she always accuses me of not responding to any of the things she says, when it is obvious that she does the exact same thing). I knew that I had to keep talking if I wanted to hear some comment from her and so I kept talking till she stopped me.
“Well, that’s interesting, but you seem tired, dear, try to go to bed early.”
And then my father took the word:
“Forget that, tell me how did work go?”
For some time this was the only topic he (my father) was interested in. He was obsessed with my work in the same way as he was obsessed with my school when I went to school and dated even before me going to school … an obsession which had no beginning, nor end, and one which was never fruitful, which only sucked the joy out of both my life and his. When I was at school, this obsession was at least controlled by the marking system i.e. when I got a good mark, (as I most often did) I would be left alone. But with my time in the office, there was no such thing: it seemed that for him there was no “correct” way to act in a given situation. For him there even wasn’t a correct situation to be in, as he didn’t approve the organization in which I worked in and was angry with me, eventhough he knew that only worked in it simply because they were hiring a person with my background.
I knew that he was also angry with me because of my earlier blaberring about the phenomenon, so I tried to fake enthusiasm, saying that it went very good – that was the only way for me to stop this conversation before it derailed to dark place, as it often did. Or perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that the dark place was its (the conversation’s) usual destination.
“Good, but don’t fall into the trap of being too happy with what you do…” – His speeches always started like this – with a friendly advice, in which the criticism is toned-down artificially, before it starts sprawing from his every word.
“Why is it a trap to be happy?” I provoked him, no so much to anger him, but to change the topic of the conversation. He just ignored my remark and started hammering his usual points, which I won’t describe in detail. The interesting thing is that I actually learned to respond to everything my father had to say in a way that finalized the conversation. I had the whole thing mapped out. If my father wasn’t a unique individual, if he had twins or clones or something, who also had children, I would arm them with some version of this table, which would make their lives a lot easier.
“Work hard and you will see the payoff when you are older” : “What if I die tomorrow?” “You should strive to be a man.”: “I strive to be human.” “Back in my day things were different”: “Then why do you think the old advice applies.” …
At the end of the evening he became drunk again and I felt sorry for him. Imagine if you were at his place: There are you, soon to past the age for pension, but still working, hoping to retire soon (and to finally get the mythical payoff that you have been dreaming about all your life (although you don’t really know what it is and from where would it come from)), there is your child, who will soon leave your house for good (and doesn’t look like he is coming over to see you very often), so you are longing to pour the lessons that you recorded during all of your life to him, and all he does is silence each attempt, with well-executed comeback (OK, perhaps not so well-executed, but still effective enough), slowly destroying your whole world with his stubborn ignorance…
As you probably realize, I didn’t want to do all of this, but at the same time, this was all I could do to preserve the little self-respect that I had. And yes, it was painful. I often felt as if I was in the wrong house, the wrong country, the wrong planet, and stuck playing the role of someone who I was not. And I tried to convince everyone that I was not that person. I tried to play his role as badly played as I possibly could, I smiled when I was supposed to be serious, and cried when I was supposed to be happy, I behaved in a way that was hurtful of other people, all in a secret hope that one day they will understand the underlying reason. All in secret hope that one day the director would yell “Cut:!” and just kick me out. And this would surely have happened if the director was human. But there wasn’t a human there, everything around me were just extensions of the machine.
Just in the middle of one of my father’s speeches I remembered the phenomenon and I got the most freaky idea ever: what if the light that I saw was all-encompassing. What if it was just sitting there every second from every day, or even not only there but everywhere, litterary under my nose, right now. But there was just noone that had eyes to see it. What if the machine just dimmed that light, making it invisible for me. If so, this was progressing fast, so if I didn’t do anything now, than the only thing that I would be able to do later is dream about that one time I saw it.
When I finished my thought, my mother had already left the room and my father was finishing his drink, and talking about something, pronouncing one word each few seconds.