36. Flickering Lights

The boy’s earliest memories were of a little dim apartment with small windows and grey walls. His family rarely turned on the lights in order to save on electricity, but when they did, they always flickered. It was in this apartment, underneath the ceiling light, that the boy would sit on the floor as he waited for his parents to return from work.

Even at a young age, he could see the way exhaustion hung on the lines of his mother’s shoulders, how it settled in the creases on his father’s forehead. They always greeted him with smiles that never managed to hide their weariness no matter how hard they tried. But try they did, and he’d learned to grow up grateful to them.

When he got a bit older, old enough to change from being a mere observer to being able to express his own thoughts, his parents always assured him that he didn’t have to worry, that he should focus on taking care of himself. But because he was older, he noticed other things too, things that he’d never paid attention to before.

He saw how the gentle way his parents looked at each other could switch at a moment’s notice to a tense boil bubbling inside sharp glares. When they thought he couldn’t hear, he heard the arguments, the raised voices barely contained in restrained whispers that the thin walls could do nothing to hide.

Even though they never said it outright, never pressured him, always tried to be supportive, he saw the hopeful flickers in his parents’ gazes when he walked back from school with a 100 on a quiz or recounted a story about a teacher praising him. Sometimes it felt like they had an easier time being proud of him than of themselves.

The boy wasn’t sure when it started, but he began to crave those flickers. He latched onto that light and thought that maybe, if he tried hard enough, he could brighten them until they soothed the hardness that had taken over his parents. He stopped waiting by the door for his parents to return from work. Instead, he spent all his time poring over borrowed textbooks until his eyes burned and scribbling furious notes until his hand was so sore it twitched even when he wasn’t holding a pencil.

The dim apartment with its narrow spaces and cold grey walls and the empty stillness of long, quiet afternoons became a familiar backdrop. And slowly but surely, he saw the hope grow in his parents’ eyes.

The weariness never truly faded. They still returned home overworked and hid the bills from him, and try as he did, the growing fractures between the two of them never truly mended themselves. But that was fine, he’d thought. As long as the three of them stayed together, he didn’t mind if he rarely saw his parents anymore and didn’t hear them return until late into the night.

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And then, when the boy turned 12, a new member was added to their little family. A little brother with a frowning face and tiny hands so much smaller than his own.

He didn’t know what to make of this new addition at first. On one hand, the silence of the apartment was replaced with the baby’s cries and sniffles and yells, and he had someone to look after, something else to do. He felt important, needed, in a way he never had before.

But on the other hand, the line of tension between his parents was becoming so frayed that he feared the inevitable day it would snap. Their faces grew hollow and gaunt, they often worked so late that he couldn’t hear them return no matter how long he stayed up for them. Those whispered yells grew louder as their restraint wore thin with the added costs of a new mouth to feed.

Looking back on it, a part of him had resented his brother. He hid it away because, even back then, he’d known it was a shameful thing, and he did everything he could to make it go away, but he couldn’t deny that the emotion was always there even as it mingled and mixed with others.

The boy, soon a teenager and then a young adult, continued to pore over his studies and strive. The pressure that his parents had tried so hard to hide from him became tangible, and it only made him all the more determined to succeed.

And succeed he did. He remembered his parents’ faces when he opened his letter of acceptance with shaking hands. In that moment, between the cheers and congratulations, was a warmth that he never realized how much he’d craved. A warmth that he never wanted to let go.

He dreamed of the day he could turn that moment, that joy, into a permanent fixture, the day he could finally tell his parents that it was okay for them to rest.

Soon, the young man had to leave the little apartment. His parents smiled at him with pride, and the little brother looked at him with eyes that felt accusing.

The next years passed by in a jumbled blur that was at once impossibly fast and yet also painfully slow. The young man learned to carve a path for himself, and away from the little apartment, he grew into his own. His back straightened with confidence, and his voice steadied with assurance. He knew who he was and what he wanted.

The dream he’d chased since he was a boy, however, would ultimately never be fulfilled.

His parents’ deaths were typed on paper, stark black ink cutting into a white page, utterly distant and incomprehensible. The young man’s life was thrown into disarray once again.

Years later, he would move into a little apartment on 108th street that reminded him so much of his childhood home. And a few years after that, the little brother who had grown so much he was nearly unrecognizable would move in, too.

And when the man looked back on those relentless years, when he thought back to the yelled arguments and the tension and the long nights wondering where he’d gone wrong, the man would say that he’d tried. He’d tried, and he’d failed, and it was already too late to try again.