Retrospective

I have nowhere to go now. My dreams are shattered, broken down to pieces of regret and shame. I could have had a decent job in my father's working place. He died last year of a sudden heart attack. Sometimes I feel things happen a bit too suddenly. Life never gives us a buffer time to contemplate and decide. I didn't want that job. I thought my hands would get dirty. The tunneling, digging and extracting was just too much of an ask. I used to wonder how my father never complained about the melancholic black colour he was surrounded with constantly.

I decided to get married just before my father's demise. He was in the pink of health then, and so was my mother. Both of them had this everlasting smile on their face.
I remember asking them once as a teenager, "How do you manage to smile so much? We live in an almost broken house, and we hardly get to eat. How do you manage to smile so wide and so often?"
My mother answered by asking me a question, "Are you happy?". I said, "Yes, of course I am happy."
"That's why we smile.", said my mother with a twinkle in her eyes.
I heard what she said, but I understand that now, sitting right here at this table.

My wife loves me. I feel I've failed to return the favour. She felt for the words, my hollow words. She felt for the exterior, my false facade. I feel sorry for her. She is pregnant now. She said she wants to have the baby badly. She is naive, oblivious to the escalating cost of living people encounter everyday. I shouldn't have married her. I am about to ruin her life, too, and also the child's. Some decisions you make in life can make or break your future. My decisions have broken and bludgeoned my present. My future is quite apparent to all. Perhaps I never made up my mind. The extracting work could have begrimed my white hands, but it could have also made me a better person than I've become now. I would have been more responsible and much more awake.

There is a village miles away from this bar, where my mother lives. She lives alone, stitching clothes all day for other villagers and earning some money just to be able to wake up tomorrow and repeat yesterday. Surprisingly, she still has that smile on her face, perhaps for the same reason. In some corner of her heart she still believes I am as happy as I was being a teenager. I have learned nothing from my parents, and perhaps it's too late now. The bottle of alcohol that I am finishing is somehow dehydrating my will, or what's left of it. Every puff of smoke the cigarette emits is anti-gravitating any hopes of my resurrection.

All that is left now is just a moment I have with my wife, right here at this table.