Complicit

People are kind.

Sometimes I forget this.

There are many kind people who have contacted me one way or another - through mutual acquaintance, through Twitter, Facebook, or the Mouthy Housewives, wanting to know when I'm going to blog again. They miss me, they say. They miss my writing.

All very kind people.

If they only knew.

The writer they miss - I don't know where she is. Or if she'll ever be back. She is so far gone that I've sat here for 20 minutes, trying to find the next words.

It's now been 30 minutes.

There is no elegant way to say this. There is certainly no humorous or irreverent way to write it, which is what I knew. Humor and irreverent writing is what I honed and sharpened. Perhaps too much so. It's quite possible I embraced irreverence just far enough to lose sight of compassion at the exact wrong time.

Three months ago my father shot himself in his backyard.

He put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

I feel I'm complicit in a self murder. People will automatically say I'm not complicit. Of course they will say that.

But they don't know.

They don't know of the slow disintegration of our family; the loss of respect, the unkindness witnessed, the ever-growing resentment - the poison between parents that seeped and spread until it tainted everyone close to it.

They don't know of the last conversations I had with my dad. Jesus, those two conversations haunt me. I can barely tell anyone of the things I said to my father those two nights. Those conversations are nightmares I can't wake up from, words I can't unspeak.

Maybe that's why I can't write anymore - I'm now terrified of words.