You said I didn’t care. I went to her grave with flowers and you shrugged. You were cruel. You mocked me. It was banal and expected, you said. It was “the least one could do and the most most did.” You pushed me. “Where is the towering inferno? Where is the pox on a dead-eyed world? Where is the hot poker and froth and wail?” You wanted me to want revenge. Meanwhile you’d been sitting in that ass-burnished chair for a decade, staring out the shatter-proof glass at the hospital grounds while your brain was monitored like a Queen’s embryo. What the fuck could you know? Cradled, coddled, a wool blanket always folded over your lap and that fistful of pills…  they were the only things you’d let into your head. Every visit you mentioned the orderly’s hairy knuckles or the tightness of the night-straps, as though they were the greatest horrors a man had ever endured. Such minutia. And after what you’d done.

I wonder what you think now? Have I changed your mind? Convinced you? It’s hard to tell with the chrome of your chair all charred, your pills bubbling to caramel, and your face… hahaha. Your face. I remember that brunette nurse with the missing tooth would always coo in your left ear, whisper that everything was alright. They weren’t though. You knew that. Never, not for a second, were things alright. And now you haven’t got a left ear to coo into have you? Or lips to turn down… I cared Dad. She was my wife. And after tonight, when they put me into my own chair, and roll me up to my own window, and start shoving those colorful pills down my throat ‘til my eyes go dead, I’ll still care. I’ll always care.