My dad sits in a greenhouse, glowing in the dark. He says, Pass the peas.
I see his brain light up like crosswalks I hardly saw in childhood, having grown up on a farm, though I imagine the crosswalks of his brain, all the different voices, and I wonder, if his voices have a color, would they be bright and neon? Or like death, the fall? Pastel, maybe gentle? Do the voices shout or whisper? Do they laugh like he sometimes did out of the blue, as if he had a secret? Or do they yell the way he yelled at me when I was just a girl and cried because I had a headache or a cough or was scared and felt I had to vomit? Do his voices make him scared? After he died, when I went to clean out his apartment, a medical card was in his wallet saying he was paranoid. A schizophrenic.
I knew something was wrong, but I never knew his diagnosis. My mom left him when I was young, and after that my dad’s parents said I was a sinner. They put me on a ride and left me spindling. They said to be ashamed. They said they had no doubt. Later, as I grew into an adult, I tried to reach my dad. My grandparents wouldn’t let me, and then they died, leaving me with nothing.
My dad couldn’t hold a conversation. He was at a halfway house and when I tried to visit, sometimes he shut the door, sometimes he stood there, staring at me, crying. His eyes looked absent, sometimes mad. Sometimes I feared that he would break me.
Now he wears sweatpants in the color of his farm clothes. Gray and forest green. A shade between the two, and he wears a pearl necklace, an heirloom I have in my jewelry box that was gifted to me when my aunt died. There’s a tattoo of an ax on his forehead. He spins his chair, leaning himself backwards. He says, The loquats here are square and dull. He says, Up here, the snow shines and it makes the sky melt.
He burps. He farts. He laughs and hands me a bread loaf and says, Say hi to god. He says, I dare you to break it. I dare you to eat it. I dare you to feel.
