it’s when you reminded him of audrey grigio, who he would bellow, was weak.
he was going to make you strong.
he was going to teach you how the world worked.
you’ve known how the world works since you were in the single digits. when your parents, as most of the world, tried to ignore the television news and the end times. immaculate seeming parties in their manhattan apartment drinking wine, dancing, laughing as if the world was not on the cusp of annihilation. as if everything was okay. you realized the magic of their forgetful ways laid in their drinks, and you would polish them off and join them in their deathlike sleep.
you learned to talk like them, to act like them and to avoid the reality in the way they had. in these hallowed walls they were not mother and father. they were audrey and john. yet rosso, however, was still uncle rosso and he would make you peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and sneak you snacks and movies so you’d go into your room. oblivious to the world around you, safe from the reality of these broken souls. he didn’t realize you were broken already, or maybe he did and he was just trying to protect you as much as he could.
he was a uncle of sorts, but you wished your father had his kindness.
when the walls came tumbling down, there was no grabbing what you could and leaving. it’d just been like that -- like duct tape getting ripped off skin. skin and hair leaving with it. blood, yet no viscera. however it hurt, it burned, and your parents put vodka on the wound. better to sterilize it now than deal with an infection later. the world was on fire, but the chaos felt like home --- felt like their parties when john and rosso would get into fights, audrey cries in the bathroom and something happens. people laugh and the party picks up again.
you say: ‘i want to get wasted.’
your mom audrey laughs: ‘so do i.’
life in the citi stadium is different. there’s no more wine, no more pizza or anything from the ol world. you found a ipod on your way here. you have music, but all that exists in terms of food is carbtein. carbtein and ache. everyone’s aching all the time, wanting something more and afraid of the undead that draw closer each day. your mother still speaks of a few artisan communities out there. that this doesn’t have to be the way it is. john’s voice is like thunder, roaring and angry. he calls her weak. he calls her foolish.
audrey grigio leaves without warning, and you die inside.
your father holds a funeral for her, and you go off the rails.
in the stadium it’s easy to fall between the cracks, and you slip so easily. when you slip you shatter, you’ve convinced yourself that the fall was controlled. you were a scared thirteen year old who wanted to forget, and people took advantage of that. you broke. the shattered remnants that remain of you are now your weapons. so you sharpen them into daggers for your nimble hands to wield, and you disregard the pain of jagged edges sinking into the palms of your hands. you ignore the way the scent of copper makes you want to wretch and the sharp stinging pain feels... familiar in a way you’ve blocked off entirely.
you’ll weaponize it and forget... you’re not veal.
you’re not weak, you’re not her.
you stop calling yourself julie grigio outside of official business, at sixteen you start calling yourself julie cabernet. you prefer cabernet anyways as your drink of choice. your dad thinks it’s a joke and you fight with him more often. for you two have always been strangers, and nothing has made that more clear to you than your sobriety. you’re not completely sober, but you’re not the borderline alcoholic you had been in the years following your mother’s disappearance. you realize him for the weakness he has, and you begin to avoid him like the pestilence he’s always been. the trauma he’s inflicted on you attempting to call it strength.
you meet perry kelvin, and he’s broken like you in different ways.
what blossoms there fells in a matter of a handful of years. he cheats on you, you don’t care, not really. it is one of the strangest things, watching someone decay in their own body. to watch the life as it begins to fade from their eyes. you see it two-fold. once in perry kelvin, once in john grigio, and if you’re honest with yourself. you’ve seen it once before, in the days leading up to audrey grigio’s disappearance. you love perry, but you hate his suffering and the way he soldiers on. he doesn’t ask for help, he doesn’t reach out and because of that he is reminiscent of your father.
and part of you is relieved when he dies.
his life is over, his pain is done. he isn’t the walking wounded.
the waking nightmare in perry kelvin is over and you’re hollow.
you're orphaned by your mother, by your lover, but you are found by the very thing you hunt with your friends. the very thing that killed your friends has saved you, and instead of seeing a light leave someone’s eyes. you’re seeing light come to another’s, and that screws with your head in a way nothing else will. instead, this shambling corpse has made it their job to keep you safe and alive, to not abandon you, but instead take you in. they save you.
they save you in a way you didn’t entirely know you needed.
and it’s not okay, it’s not remotely okay for a long time. then it is, but nothing good ever lasts in citi stadium, and eventually you realize that the light is coming back to not only their eyes, but others as well. they introduce their friend m, and you introduce nora. something is being built here, but as with all change --- your father’s reaction is volatile and gross, even by his best friend’s standard. you look to john grigio on a rooftop, and without flinching he orders your hit. orders your ‘uncle’ to kill you, but he won’t. he won’t because you’ve done nothing to wrong him, to wrong them, and when your father dies; you feel relief.
the same kind of relief that came with perry kelvin’s demise.
you don’t get a final look at your father’s corpse, as he becomes warped and skeletal in brief moments. rosso’s agape stare at the abyss of bone-walkers and nearlies that surround show the true horror of what had transpired. you think of back in the apartment building, where the happy couple drank themselves into a stupor and laid like sleeping zombies atop one another on the couch. where you drank their potions of forgetfulness and fell into the same stupor and sleep. you see the way the world was and is.
escapism and control brought about a chaotic variable.
they tried to prepare you by showing you the monsters.
what they failed to realize was you’d been living with monsters your entire life.
for the first time in your life, you were actually safe.
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