The Earth doesn’t know its shadow on the moon.
1.
“Pull yourself together, Durden!”
I cried in half anger and half desperation. It was when we left from mom’s charnel house and having a conversation on a bench. Realizing that it was out of my hand, I could only think of running away. Leaving Tyler at the bench, I walked along the riverside as if to meet the real face of the ever-flowing river.
2.
Tyler was home with a paper bag in his hand.
“Had dinner?” asked Tyler casually.
“Oh yes. I had it with my friends outside.”
“Writing something, eh?”
“Yeah, just a diary.”
Tyler headed to his room to take off his clothes. Soon I heard a noise of crashing.
There was Tyler coming out of his room muttering “Damn it, damn it” with sharply raised eyes. Things were happening all over again. He came close and ripped down the curtain next to me, and kicked away the table that I was writing. I was just there sitting with blankness and futility. When he stretched his arms toward me, I removed those violently.
“Okay, that’s it! You do whatever you want with this fucking house. I’m going out!”
I picked up the pen and the diary and snatched the coat from the hanger. The hanger fell down scattering the fabrics hung on it.
Out in the night, I always have places to go. In fact, in days when Dad was out of his mind, every place seems to be my house and my place. But I wandered around, not because I had to, but because I liked to. Like a moss following a streetlight, I chased a neon light of a bar. In the bar where I always feel like home, I had a drink and met people, placating myself. Then I wrote the last of the day’s diary.
When I was refreshed enough – refreshed on my sense as well as my pain – I returned home. Realizing how fast a night had passed, I opened our front door.
“You’re late.” said Dad from the inside.
“I know.”
3.
As usual, after drinking binge, I push opened the front door singing. I saw Dad lying deep on a sofa, but rather chose to ignore it.
“Mind to tell me where you have been.”
“Yes, a little. I’m really tired, dad. I want to go to bed.”
“No, you listen to me. What the hell are you doing with your life? Do you know what you are doing? Do you see yourself right?”
From his voice, I realized that he was going to start the same-old thing. I was sick and tired of those conversations, but that day I felt that I had something to blame on him. I do not know why I felt so, but I was so in the mood of having a struggle. But still nothing changed; we never face the real problem.
“I know exactly what I’m doing with my life. Doing what I like, being free.”
“You call that being free; drinking until you pass out, wandering here and there looking for the next whore you can screw? Open your eyes, Ted. That is not what you call ‘free’. That is not you.”
He always loves to exaggerate about my drinking and social life. The fact that Tyler, who can’t even control himself, was blaming about my attitude brought slow burn over me. I wasn’t a young man of exemplary life, but still I never was out of my mind and I knew the moderate.
“Who are you to define who I am? You don’t know me. You don’t understand. Do you know what I feel when I drink? I feel this hidden part of me coming to life. This part of me that has been dead since mom passed away. Do you know what I feel with all the girls? I feel this new emotions erupting inside of me for each ones. That is how I see myself. That is what I am. So don’t pretend to understand me. You don’t know what it is like to be me.”
“Ted, being yourself is not just about what you think, perhaps erroneously, about yourself. It is also about others. Have you thought about me? Have you thought about your mother? What do you think she will say when she sees you like this?”
“That is exactly what I wanted to tell you, Dad”
Then for few seconds, there was a short silence.
“Ted, you got to have your life.”
“I perfectly have my life. Take care of yourself. Look what mess you made!” I pointed out the broken households.
“Oh, that, it might be the whiskey I had last night.”
“Whiskey? Everyday whiskey! Do we even have money to buy whiskeys?”
Then I stomped angrily out of my house.
4.
“Your father is going through dissociative identity disorder. He has two identities in himself: his original ego and this newly made Durden ego. It probably is his wife’s death which brought the creation of the new ego. The shock and trauma he had from the accident were strongly embedded in his unconscious. He tries to believe that he overcome all the hardships and stress he got from the incident, but the emotional repression made another ego in himself and the ego is expressing his inner stress instead of the original one. The case of your father does have a cure, but no one can be sure whether it will work or not. To cure him, we have to get all these multiple identities together. The way to do so is to gradually allow him to face all the identities and to make him admit those. If we are lucky enough, the identities could come together in one.”
“Thanks, but you should have told me this earlier.”
“No, no one can be sure whether it will work. And you being no profession of psychology, can’t tell if it will work at all.”
“Who cares? I just need something done on him. I can’t just live like this.”
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