A young man sits alone in a room. Though it is his bedroom, it looks like an office, not a fancy, distinguished man’s office but an office no less, and he is sitting at a desk cluttered with…well all sorts of things, just cluttered. It hardly matters. He is writing something with pen and paper, and he appears distraught. He sets the pen down as though he is finished and happy with his words and promptly slices his wrists with the razor we could not see from behind. That…is the scene…but it is not really the scene, is it? That is one scene, certainly, but there is of course more to it than that. Let us take a step back, maybe dig a little deeper, for I refuse to let this young man die as a nobody, a faceless, formless, nameless figure…hardly human, hardly anything at all.

SOME FORGOTTEN TIME AGO…

A shout from his older brother at six-thirty in the morning is how he would start those days. It’s funny how his brother would wake up just to wake him up. He was never known as the reliable one…but they were young. He had nothing to be late for then. Even if he were late, it would be no fault of his. No repercussions would face him. The only thing he had to fear was his father, for staining the leather seats of that ’67 Chevy was about the only thing he knew never to do.

Open fields of grass, a single tree stealing the show: this is what surrounded the property. This is what Jordan saw every day on the commute. Robert, his father, would drive; his brother and he would sit up front with him, Jordan illegally between them with no car seat. When you’re young, you don’t get to have a taste in music. That is certainly how I remember it, anyway. Therefore, classic rock, the generational ‘dad-music,’ played each morning, praising things his brother and he did not yet understand, shouting words they should not yet have heard…but that was home to them. That was their father, and they would not have had it any other way. It did get the blood pumping, especially as they would approach what they referred to as “The Big Woo-Hah,” quite the ominous title for nothing more than a medium sized hump in the road at the end of theirs, but can you imagine? A father drives his two boys to school before work, blasting classic rock, laughing all the way, preparing to launch, shouting “WOO-HAH!” as they would crest the ever so average hump in the road, made large by their size in comparison. That…was purity, innocence, joy.

Jordan’s favorite part of those mornings was breakfast. Pressed for time as Robert was, he spared no expense for convenience. He would drive through Burger King every morning, and the boys would take it with them to school. Sausage, egg, and hash browns: that is what made Jordan the man he is today. Even now, he is haunted by those days at the very mention of the establishment. Before leaving for work, Robert would cut the circular sausage patty into little squares with his pocketknife. Regardless of how late he was, regardless of all else, he would do this, as if it were the most meaningful gesture he had ever executed. Never mind how dirty the knife must have been. Never mind how spoiled Jordan was to have received such treatment. That is love, as simple, as mockable, as cheap as slicing Burger King sausage with a pocketknife.

            It is no mystery why his father cared so much. Robert’s father was not exactly around… In fact, his father literally was not around, and Jordan’s father…he knew abandonment; he knew the feeling of worthlessness; perhaps better than Jordan will ever know them, he knew. Robert’s mother was poor, but she tried. She kept him fed and sheltered. She was strong, and he was strong because of her. She drank, and Robert drank. Robert was a professor, and his mother was a teacher. Funny how things work out like that. It is almost as if he strove to be like her…and it’s no wonder Jordan strives so to be like him.

Like his mother, Robert was imperfect, and there were things he hid from his children. They knew he drank. Robert regularly threw house parties at which he would have many beers with family friends, though it was all in good fun. They would later come to find that he would also enjoy a cigarette or five when everyone was gone, perhaps to relax his reflective moments. His family is prone to vices. Admittedly, it has been a great struggle of mine as well, but I digress.

            Nevertheless, Robert overcame his hardships, plentiful though they were. He made it through high school and undergrad handily; he even obtained a master’s in mathematics. He worked harder than Jordan ever needed to in order to ensure this outcome, most certainly. He supported himself through college with nearly no financial support, and Jordan always respected him for that. He was the gold standard in his son’s eyes. There was no need to look elsewhere for a role model, for Jordan had him.

            Skip ahead almost a decade, and we see that unfortunately, things change. Jordan the child becomes Jordan the teenager. A father develops expectations. Hell, everyone does. The template Jordan represented became molded and fixed. Opportunities he had were made to seem as fantasies. He knows now that his father only wanted the best for him…he had the purest intentions. He knows that his father only wanted him to do more than his old man with the many blessings he was afforded in comparison…but Jordan was young, and his father’s suggestions seemed only limiting. His guidance made Jordan feel imprisoned. His discipline felt unjust, as though Jordan had only ever been falsely accused…but what was he to say? What, as a sixteen-year-old kid, was Jordan to say to established adults to get them to realize that he may have something to say on his own behalf? Movies and television, prior generations, culture, legislation: they all suggest that a child is a child until 18 years of age. He had no voice, none worth listening to, at the very least, and that was the loaded gun keeping him, and many others, silent.

            How are we to know that the adults are equally scared? How are we to know that they, too, had no idea what they were doing?

And how was Jordan to know…that he would be as he is now? How was he to know that he would come to understand…that he had the best father he could have asked for? How was he to know that many great tragedies would befall him in the years to come? or that his psyche would forsake him? How was he to know that life does not care what you do right or what you do wrong? that justice is rare? How was he to know that he would never be able to say this to his father? that he had come to realize the love and the respect he had for him?

Alas, we never can know such things until it is too late. That seems to be the pattern. We do not know how we will change in the years to come, just as Jordan didn’t. We cannot know when someone will be taken from us too soon, just as Jordan couldn’t. After all, how was he to know that his father would fall victim to the most innocent of his vices…caffeine…so innocuous? How was Jordan supposed to know that spilled coffee on precious leather could be lethal? that a father’s frustration and panic might somehow affect the trajectory of his vehicle? And how, I ask, was he to know that he would be sitting here, tears flowing as he fades away, wishing as he does that he could return to a time when all he had to fear was his fantastic father’s hatred for stained leather?