History Repeats Itself - A Sestina

4 am on a suburban street. A dripping wet bone-chilling night in mid fall.

Hunched over on ripped stockings, groping the night’s remaining darkness,

a new day begins as usual; goosebumps, spinal outline poking through her exposed back.

Kneeling in front of her dark house she scans the walkway for fallen keys, lost

among a shadowy, funereal cacophony of dead and waterlogged leaves

that seem to sing with the dull thud of falling rain, falling apart in her cold, searching hands.

She loses balance, falling to her side. Escaping the delayed reach of her hands,

from her unzipped backpack to the ground, a half empty bottle makes a hard fall,

spreading in fragments with the impact of a child jumping into a pile of leaves.

Sticky, bitter fumes arise; broken glass screams displace the quiet dark;

Foggy, large pupils now glaze over with frustrated tears, her patience is lost.

She stumbles over unseen keys and her parents’ liquor to get to the backyard.

Her mother left the door unlocked. Half-hearted gratefulness ensues as she enters the back

hallway. The house echoes unfinished arguments; its tension pulses her shrivelled hands.

“Come here, please.” – Words that ring exasperation from the next room, trailing off, lost.

She follows them to a familiar sight: her mother on the living room couch, blankets fallen

on the floor beside her. Her mother sleeps, or has tried to, her heavy sighs filling the dark.

Their eyes meet. “This needs to stop. And don’t you dare wake your dad.” She leaves.

Breath withheld as she passes her father’s cracked door, she slides into bed, evening clothes left

on, like yesterday. She is tired but knows she will not sleep, once again. She rolls over onto her back

and stares at the ceiling, once again. History repeats itself, her thought lingers in the dark.

Tomorrow, she will be in trouble with her father, his overpowering voice, his iron fists of weak hands –

hands that, in her mind, are repeatedly wrapped around the naked stranger in her parents’ room, falling

deep into temptation and further down that slick, exposed back. Her illusions of family; further lost.

He avoids the plague of guilt. Her stealing, lying, late nights and self-destruction seem to be lost

on him like they’d made no eye contact through his cracked door, like he hadn’t seen the softness leave

her psyche and return in the form of a numb disenchantment. Most often her mother chose to fall

into oblivion: “It’s just a phase,” she would tell her husband, and sometimes silently take it back.

She wasn’t sure she believed it when they argued, when he grabbed her shoulders with his hands,

when she thought of her daughter’s hollow eyes, when she laid alone, insomniac in the living room dark.

Her daughter knew that history continued to repeat itself, staring at the ceiling in the darkness

of her bedroom. She knew it every weeknight she came home broke, throwing up, senses lost.

Her father knew it too: history couldn’t be controlled by his iron fist; his weak hands.

Nor could the excessive money, the liquor, the little bags of white powder – that kept leaving

his coat pockets and coming home in the form of a drunken girl – take the implications of the past back.

He knew it every night when she crept past his cracked door and was gone, as swiftly as darkness fell.

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