The Words I Don’t Have a Place For, The Parts I Hold Gently.
I remember the first time I met my father's rage, though it's one of the few memories my mind refuses to dissolve; clinging to it like a scar etched beneath the surface of my skin. I was just a child, eight maybe nine. Small enough to vanish in the folds of a blanket, but old enough to understand that something sacred was fracturing around me.
We lived in a sun-bleached trailer perched on a forgotten hill in the depths of nowhere Tennessee, where the trees grew thick and close and the nearest neighbor was a whisper too far. The air was always heavy there, saturated with humidity and the unrelenting drone of cicadas. At night, the trees come alive with eerie howls and creaking pines, and the house itself seemed to groan beneath the weight of something ancient and restless. I had learned to tune out the unease, the shuddering floorboards, the way the wind slipped through every crack like something watching, waiting.
But that night was different.
I was tucked beneath my worn-out blanket, curled in my narrow bed, when I first felt it. Not heard it, but felt it. Something dark rising, coiling like smoke beneath the floorboards. At first a murmur, a low vibration in the bones of the house but it grew. My father's voice cracked through the walls like a whip, jagged and feral, a sound that didn't belong to any human I knew. It was deeper than shouting, it was seismic. A thunderclap of fury that seemed to tear the stillness apart.
I had heard him angry before. I knew the tension in his jaw, the flare in his nostrils, the way his fists clenched like he was holding back the tide. But this was something altogether different. This rage; pure, raw, unfiltered, a monstrous thing that filled the air like fire and made the shadows themselves cower. I could feel it thrum beneath my skin, a ferocity that didn't need to be seen to be understood. It was as though the very walls were warping beneath the heat of it, the structure of our fragile life towards collapse.
Furniture was damaged, walls were struck. The sound of things breaking punctuated the night like distant fireworks, only there was nothing to celebrate. My mother's voice came, soft and strained, worn thin by years of trying to calm a storm that could never be tamed. Her words were quiet, like prayers whispered into a hurricane. An me, I stayed frozen, every muscle locked tight, curling into myself as if I could disappear. I didn't cry, didn't breath. I simply waited for the world to stop shaking.
That was the moment I understood: rage isn't just loud, it's heavy. It presses in on you, fills the room, seeps into you lungs until you're not sure if the air will ever be clean again. It's not just a feeling, It's a place. A landscape made of broken glass and blistered memories, and once you've stepped into it, you never really leave.
Eventually, it ended. The trailer exhaled, settling into a brittle, uneasy silence. But the silence wasn't safe. It soaked in the residue of what had passed, suffocating and sharp-edged. I lay there for a long time, staring into the dark, knowing without fully knowing that I would carry this night forever. That this would be the blueprint for all the memories that would follow. It wasn't the last time I met my father's rage. But it was the first to leave it's mark.
Years later, after all the tension, rage-filled voicemails, the fractured phone calls that ended in tears or cold silence, I found myself sitting in another kind of quiet. The phone rang again and the voice on the other end was not calm but also not yours. It was trembling, loud, and rushed, cracked open by urgency. The kind of voice that enters like a gust of wind through a window left open in the dead of night.
You were gone. The words didn't land all at once. It slipped in sideways, almost missed between breathless explanations and disjointed sentences. But then it hit, and for a single, impossible moment, I felt something that should never accompany death.
There was a split second, a breath caught in my throat, of something that tasted like freedom. Just a flicker, a single heartbeat where my chest loosened and decades began to lift. It felt like stepping out into a cool breeze after suffocating in heat for years. My body reacted before my thoughts could catch up and for the first time, I could breathe.
And then came the wave.
The sadness was tidal, swallowing me before I even had time to understand it's shape, knocking the breath right back out of me. Not just sadness for you, a mourning for the person you could've been, for the wounds you never healed, the love you never quite learned how to give. For the pieces of you that were soft when they weren't sharp. But more that anything, it was sorrow for the ones you left behind. The ones who held on. The ones who still hoped. The ones who learned to read your moods like weather reports, always bracing for the next storm. The ones who built stories from your better days and held onto them like heirlooms. The ones who saw goodness in you even when it flickered like a dying bulb.
Grief has no map, it's a place where emotion layers itself like sediment. First cam the relief, sharp and guilty. Then guilt for feeling relief. Then the ache. And then something softer, something quieter. A kind of place that comes when the war ends, even if the battlefield still smolders. A knowing that I no longer had to brace myself. That your name would no longer flash on my screen, bringing dread with it. In the quiet that follows maybe I can finally begin to let go.
I didn't want to feel relieved, but I did. And that truth, complicated, unspeakable, honest, will sit with me for the rest of my life. Like a stone I keep in my pocket. Heavy, worn smooth over time, always there.
