Spotlight

My father would always tell me to take my time. He’d shuffle up to our attic and skim his way around the pots and bowls of paints that made up my studio just to tell me advice, or to keep my company. I found out much later on that most of this advice was stuff he’d read in the problem pages of his favourite newspaper, but it didn’t matter really.

That attic was the one place in my life that existed seemingly out of time. Up there I wasn’t a shining replica of my mother’s disappointment to him. I wasn’t brown hair and blue eyes and freckles, just the same as her. I was Person X and he was Person Y, just two people that happened to coexist.

Even all those years later when I found out just why mum was so distant, I couldn’t be angry with him. I should’ve been, I know. I should’ve been furious that I was the product of a – to put it nicely – less than happy marriage, but every time a bad thought crossed my mind I’d just remember him sitting next to me all those afternoons, tuning his wireless to whatever interesting program was on.

And really, I was just the same as him. Not in actions, probably, but in character. We are all made up of many different people and it’s hard to be all of them at once. I was a daughter, and a sister, and lots of other things as well. I’m even more things now.

He was a coward, and he was worse things than that. But I can’t hate him for it because one of those people inside him was wonderful, and my nostalgia is stronger than my anger.