The Fruit, the Tree, and Gravity

They'd only been divorced
for a few years and I still
spent most weekends at his place--
the house where our family had lived
and died. My mother had taken her things
to her apartment across town
but the house remained basically the same
since her possessions didn't amount to much.
That probably made it harder for me to be there
though for my father it seemed like a never-changing haven:
the six-two, two-thirty male version of Dickens'
Miss Havisham who tasted love, lost it, and holed up
in its tomb-- the main difference being that he'd
had the unfortunate chance to consummate and bear child.
That lie they spread about having and losing being better
is for those who waste time trying to make life a greeting card
that it's not and never will be.

My father had reverted to his bachelor habits
in the single status that he'd so expertly earned himself.
For years he didn't buy new towels. The same faded brown
rags, threadbare in places and constantly moist, hung from the
rack in the bathroom for days on end until the task
of doing laundry couldn't be avoided any longer.
Due to their constant presence in the dampness
of his bathroom they took on an overbearingly musty
smell caused by the mildew that had tainted the fabric.
No amount of washing ever cleansed them of their stench.
It clung to your body afterwards, it hung in the air like
a noose. I was too young to realize the degree of ignorance
on his part. That's just how dad's towels smelled. I dealt with it.

Tonight when I pulled the vivid blue towel that she bought for me
from the rack and dried my hair I could smell the sour odor
of that bathroom I haven't been in for years and won't ever again.
It'd been a few days since I'd rotated. After drying myself off
I tossed the towel into the laundry hamper, an old persistent fear
poking its ugly head out from the darkest corners of my mind.

I won't.
I can't.
I'm trying.