I woke up just after ten the next morning. There was no sign that my mom had been home the night before. This didn’t worry me, though, as that was standard practice for her. Not long after my dad left, she would often not come home for a day or four at a time. After her first absence, I asked where she had been, and she replied that she had been with her dear friend, Nunya Business, and that’s as far as I ever got with that line of questioning.

Thinking back on it now, I feel that it very much was my business, and I probably should have given child services a call to see what they had to say about it. But I was only a boy, and this was the only home I had ever known, so I had nothing to compare it with. To me, this was just how moms were.

Since it was my birthday, I decided to have cake for breakfast. I found the cake mix my mom mentioned she had bought for me. However, it was for carrot cake, which she enjoyed but which I detested, so that plan was out the window. My mom was always buying stuff for me that was actually for her like that, although, to be fair, I don’t think she knew what I liked. (I liked chocolate cake best, in case you were wondering.)

However, one thing you’ll learn about me if you hang around me long enough is that once I get in the mood for cake, nothing can stop me. So, I ransacked the kitchen for ingredients to make a cake from scratch. I found the flour right away, which was a great start. But something I learned on this day is that great starts make for pretty lousy endings, as we had no other cake ingredients in the house.

But, like I said, I wanted cake, and nothing was going to stop me. I made a batter with the flour, some Sweet & Low packets I found at the back of a drawer, and a little water. I cooked the batter like pancakes, accepting that this was the closest to a cake I would get on this day.

When they were done, I searched for some birthday candles but found none. I improvised and stuck a match into my pancakes instead. I cleared my mom’s magazines and dirty coffee cups off the kitchen table, sat down with my short stack, and lit the match. As I watched it burn, it became painfully clear that this was the worst attempt at a birthday cake in human history. The pancakes were flat and dull and completely lacking the joy that’s supposed to accompany a birthday.

Nevertheless, I considered singing to myself and making a wish. But I decided against it. How pathetic I would have looked, and, knowing my luck, that’s just when Jason and Cody would come walking past the window, and I’m sure they’d have some smart remarks for me.

So, I blew out the match without any fanfare and took a bite of pancake.

It did not taste good.

I dumped the pancakes into the trash and noticed I had made a lot of dishes for one bite of food, which only compounded my misery. I decided to wash them to avoid a verbal lashing (or worse) from my mom upon her eventual return.

This wasn’t the wisest thing to do, however, as washing the dishes isn’t a very stimulating task. It just gives you a chance to realize how crappy birthdays are when the only person who ever loved you is dead.

As I scrubbed the frying pan, memories of my dad swashed around in my head. These included a memory from my previous birthday—to a few days before it, actually, to an argument between my mom and dad. The background to this argument is that I wanted a bouncy castle set up in the yard for my party, but my mom was against the idea. It could even count as my present, I had said, and it didn’t have to be the princess-themed castle if that was the issue.

That wasn’t the problem, though. My mom was against the bouncy castle because she refused to waste money on something like that since no one ever came to my birthday parties.

But then Dad stepped in. “Let’s just get him the damn bouncy castle. Even if no one comes to his party, it’ll be a good memory that he’ll never forget. And that’s the whole point of a birthday, or so I’m told.”

“Have you met our son?” my mom asked. “He’s gonna piss around in there for ten minutes, get bored, and then it’s gonna sit there in the yard for the rest of the day, and he’s not going to form any long-term memories by the end of it. You know how he is with his birthday presents.”

“But it’s not always like that,” my dad said. “What about that umbrella he got that one year? We couldn’t get that thing away from him.”

He was right. I did use to play Imagination Rain all the time. However, my mom felt the need to take that umbrella away from me after walking in on me slow-dancing with it one particularly lonely afternoon. She was right to do it. She didn’t need to force me to watch as she burned it, though.

My mom won the debate with my dad in the end. It was like all their disagreements: Even though my dad’s argument was better structured and his examples more relevant to the topic, my mom was a louder yeller, and she could come up with hurtful names and insults more quickly. And she could hit him.

Boy, could she ever hit him.

I got hit sometimes, too, but nothing like what my dad got. But that’s largely because my dad would take my lumps for me. If I did something bad, he would take responsibility. He’d say he should have been watching me or that he should have taught me better. That way, she’d direct her anger at him. “Just don’t hurt the boy,” was one of his catchphrases.

And, afterward, he’d always make sure I was okay, even though he was the one with the bruises. And he’d promise that he’d always protect me.

Such memories made me miss my dad like all hell. I missed having him stick up for me, and I missed having someone think I was worth protecting. Now that he was gone, nobody, including myself, thought I was worth anything. Nobody loved me now, and nobody ever would. I’d have to face the fact that I wasn’t a likable person. I was ugly, hateful, and alone.

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I didn’t want to do the dishes anymore. If I got hit for making a mess, then I got hit. I didn’t care. I wanted to sulk.

I went upstairs to my bedroom and went through my dad’s record collection, which I had inherited. I was looking for one record in particular: Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones. That was his favorite, and it often filled the house when he still lived here.

I hadn’t listened to it since he died because I was afraid it would make me too sad. But I was in that woe-is-me zone, that place where you’re already sad and for some reason want to feel even sadder. So, I put the record on and lay in bed, letting myself sink into sadness, remembering what it felt like to have my dad in my life and fearing that with each day, it would get harder to remember him.

It was mostly little things I missed: His fascination with video cameras. Our long summer drives to nowhere. The way he would let me ride the elevator at the mall, how we’d go to the arcade they had there, how he always let me pick what games we played and was happy to just watch if I wanted to play a one-player game.

My mom never took me to the arcade. She never even let me ride the elevator. She was always in a rush to do whatever she was at the mall to do. Unless she ran into one of her friends, in which case she would chatter away for what seemed like hours. But my dad always put me first. Nobody ever puts anybody first, now that he’s gone, I thought.

Just as that thought entered my head, “Wild Horses” came on. The instant I heard the opening notes, I could have sworn my dad’s spirit was in the room with me, and it remained with me until the song ended. I listened to it ten times in a row, trying to recapture the feeling of my dad’s presence, willing myself to believe his soul still lived somewhere in the distant reaches of the universe and was communicating with me via Mick Jagger.

He desperately wanted me to know that, just as I believed, he hadn’t abandoned me by taking his own life. He was trying to tell me that wild horses couldn’t drag him away from me.

But one line in particular bothered me: “Faith has been broken, tears have been cried. Let’s do some living after we die.” Why would my dad say faith had been broken right before mentioning death? That kind of made it sound like he had committed suicide.

So, I decided he wasn’t trying to communicate with me after all. Maybe I could feel him simply because I wanted to, like how my mom thinks every bird she sees is her own deceased father paying her a visit, even though that’s impossible. Plus, even if it were possible, that’s not really fair—it’s like, come on, Mom, let someone else have a bird once in a while.

Probably nothing was amazing. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my dad was there, wanting to communicate something to me from some far-off land where people’s souls go when they die. He was so close it hurt.

I really don’t want to say what I did next, as there’s a pretty big embarrassment factor to it. But part of the writer’s curse is that you have to share everything with the reader—the good and the bad. As my creative writing teacher down at the community college once said, “If you only want to show the reader the good parts of your life, you might as well get the hell out and start an Instagram.” I pointed out that Instagram is mostly pictures, though, not writing. And she said, “Yeah, exactly,” in a way that told me that this had obviously been her point. I didn’t say anything else for the rest of the class that day.

Also, her name was Mrs. Lennon, not Mrs. Lemon, so I had been a marked man in that class since day one anyway. She decided right away that I wasn’t going to amount to anything as a writer, and she told me so. Not directly, but, for example, the first time I read something out loud for the class, all she said was, “Yep. That’s about what I expected from you.” I was ready to give up on writing after that, but the girl in the office said I couldn’t get my eighty-five dollars back, so I kept at it.

Anyway, just so you know, you’re the first person I’ve ever told this to: I went back to the kitchen, retrieved my pancakes from the garbage, and put them on a plate. I lit another match and stuck it in. And then, like a huge loser, I sang the birthday song to myself through tears.

Then, I said, “I know this is a long shot, but if there’s a god or anything like that out there who can hear me right now, I really, really miss my dad, and I wish I could see him again.” And then I blew out the match. Or I guess a better description would be to say I sighed it out, if you can picture that.

I chucked the pancakes in the garbage, returned to my bedroom, and cried until my face hurt.

As I wallowed in self-pity, the dark thoughts returned as my sadness transformed into anger. This was a pattern I had gotten used to. I would often think about my dad until I felt depressed and completely alone in this bitter, cruel world. I would then decide that there was something inherently wrong with everyone—everyone was too mean or selfish or greedy or all of the above—and it was their fault the world was so terrible. At this point, I would imagine harming people. I kicked their teeth down their throats, ripped their fingernails off, set them on fire, and so on.

However, until this day, I had always pictured myself committing these violent acts against nameless, faceless people, and I had never wanted to actually do the things I imagined. They were just fantasies, an outlet for my emotions.

But this time, when I closed my eyes, I was in a dark room. In the middle of this room was my mom, bound to a chair, a spotlight shining on her. I had a baseball bat, and I beat her face in with it. She begged me to stop. But her anguish and the way her tears mixed with her blood as they ran down her face only made the act sweeter. I couldn’t stop, didn’t want to stop. Several minutes passed as I beat her mercilessly, eventually killing her.

I was heartbroken as I stared at her dead body. Not because of what I had done but because the act was over, like I was a small child and the last day of my Disneyland vacation had come to an end. I didn’t want this to end. For the first time, I wanted one of my dark thoughts to be a dark reality.

I opened my eyes. My heart was pounding. I’m not sure if it was from the excitement of beating my mom to death or from the fear of what I might become if I ever lost control of my dark thoughts.

I took some deep breaths to calm myself and then looked out the window. A butterfly was resting on the exterior side of the windowpane, the sunshine illuminating its green wings. How peculiar—another green butterfly like from the day before. Or, more likely, it was the same one, as I recently looked up “green butterflies” on the internet, and no species has ever been sighted in my part of the world (except twice by me, of course).

This butterfly reminded me of the other rare thing I had encountered yesterday: Mag, a human who I hadn’t instantly despised, a human who I would even say I trusted on some level. I also remembered how troubled she seemed, and I wondered if perhaps her heart was as black as mine. Maybe she’d understand me if I told her about my dark thoughts. Maybe she could even help me stop being the way I was.

Yes, I would go see Mag, and I would tell her that I had dark thoughts about killing people and that they were starting to frighten me. I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to work that into a conversation, but I’d think of something.

Once enough of the puffiness in my eyes had subsided that Mag wouldn’t know I had been crying, I went to see if she was home.