I remember, I remember vividly, those days when father would come home drunk, only to throw up on the carpets. When mother cleaned them and told him to stop drinking, he would beat her up, telling her that she wasn't the one in charge of his life.
As a 7 year old, I was so scared of him. When he would grab me by the collar and threaten me to kill innocent people just so he could devour them mercilessly. He would start laughing when he saw the fear in my eyes. He knew he had control, he knew he had power, and he loved it. He loved the authority.
Mother was so scared of him, she didn't say a word when he spat nonsense towards her or threatened to kill her.
I remember when I couldn't get the first position in class, he would fill the bathtub with cold water and throw me in it. He would, sometimes, put me in the closet and lock it. He knew I was scared of the dark, and he used it against me. I could hear his cackles when he locked me in the dark and I begged for him to open the door.
"You're too weak"
"You look too much like a girl"
"You're too short"
"Only girls are scared of the dark, you know that?"
He would tell me these things almost every day. It hurt, it hurt to hear those words from him, until it didn't.
I started telling myself that I hated him. When he would look me up in my room or in the bathroom, I would hear noises from outside. Mother telling him to stop, but he wouldn't. When he finally left at night, she would quickly run up to my room to comfort me, hug me and tell me it was alright. But she didn't succeed, not even the slightest bit. I would tell her she had bruises and cuts on her face and that it must hurt. She would smile at me and tell me it didn't. She would hold me in her arms all night, clean the mess in my room, clean me up and put me to bed. When she thought I was asleep, she would cry. "I'm sorry, my baby. I'm so sorry" she would say through the tears falling from her eyes.
Sometimes I kept pretending to be asleep, sometimes I asked her what's the matter and she would smile at me "Nothing, honey. You should sleep."
I started hating him. I started hating him so much, I wanted to kill him so that mother and I could be free as soon as possible.
I didn't like killing people. So, sometimes I thought of killing myself.
There isn't such concept as suicide in our society as desicles. I would be reminded. So, when I turned 15, I started planning to kill him. I thought that one day, when he came home drunk, I would kill him on the spot. I would make him suffer in pain, before actually killing him. All kinds of wild thoughts started coaxing my mind. I thought of all the possible ways I could make him suffer. I thought of beating him up and then dragging him out, all the way to the frozen lake near our house. I thought of knocking him unconscious and throwing him in the cold, freezing water of that deep lake.
On my 16th birthday, when he came home – drunk – at dawn, mother was asleep in her room. I took advantage of it and knocked him down. I thought of all the times he hurt me and mother. I picked up a knife from the kitchen and just as I was about to stab his left eye, I was reminded of the moments when he would come to my room and apologize for his behavior. The pain he caused us was nothing compared to the pain we felt when he told me that he loved us.
I helped him up and while he was still unconscious, I took him to his room. When mother saw the knife still in my hands, she started crying and apologizing to me. "I'm sorry. I tried my best to love you and take care of you so you wouldn't turn out like him, but it didn't work. I'm so sorry" she kept saying.
When I turned 18, he died in a car accident. I loathed him so much, that I was actually happy we got rid of him. But what got to me, was the fact that he left his fortune to us.
If he had left his wealth to an illegitimate child we didn't know about, I wouldn't have been surprised, but when I read his will, when I read the lines that said that he loved me and mother and that he was sorry for all that he did, my hatred for him only fueled up.
I wanted to dig him out of his grave. I wanted to shake him, beat the shit out of him and tell him how much I hated him. I wanted to brake his hands into pieces whenever he touched mother because he only came near her to hurt her. I wanted to tell him that I didn't need his charity, that I could take care of mother by myself. I wanted to tell him all those things that I knew about him and that I once attempted to kill him but failed. Only, I couldn't. He was dead now. Rotting away in his grave and all I could do was pray that he didn't get off the hook so easily.