Boy

This story was inspired by a friend, who gave me the first sentence and told me to run with it.

Dad was gone before I was able to ask him to stay. He told me he'd take me to school that morning, but I woke up in the middle of the night to a weight---like a finger pressed to my heart---and I knew his truck was already miles away from me and mom, straining and stretching the thread that bound our small family until it snapped, thin and shredded. I stared at the clock above the kitchen table---an old cuckoo clock that stopped cuckooing long before I was born. 4:27 in the morning. I imagined my dad's headlights bouncing through the dark, leading him to a place far away, a place that I would never know. I watched the hands on the clock move until the windows slowly lit with the canary glow of morning through limp white curtains. And though I stood in the house of my childhood---with its peeling floral wall paper and worn green carpets--- nothing was familiar, and nothing was the same. His departure was that one moment in life where everything you've known becomes a residue that never washes out, only serving as a reminder of what was, and what could have been. It's the moment when familiar paths shift, become dark and take you miles from where you thought you were going. I knew that everything would change, and that nobody was prepared. It was the summer of 1980, and I was seven.