There are two things you need to know about me. I don’t cry, and I don’t fall in love. The two seem to be forever intertwined. Love is heartbreak with kisses. Heartbreak is love without someone to be as equally miserable with.

            I wasn’t always so cynical, I promise. It all started with a fight. The biggest fight my parents ever had. A fight that changed my life forever. Some fights are started over money, or dishonesty, or drugs. This fight however, was over a piece of toast.

            It was 3am, Sunday morning, April 13th, 1989. It was warm out, but the sun was still nowhere to be seen. My father, James Jacob Cook (1930-1989, RIP), worked two jobs to keep our family together. My mother, Annabelle Nicole Cook (1932-1989, RIP), had cancer and couldn’t work. My father worked at the bar at night, and worked at the office during the day.  I wouldn’t normally have been up so early, but my mother was having a usually bad night and I stayed up to give her medication.

            My father came home at 3:03, I remember because I thought that that was a unusual time. He took his shoes off and put bread into the toaster to have a snack before he went to bed. He always did this, but this time was different. He didn’t stand in the kitchen and stare at the toaster, as if daring it to burn his toast. He went to the bathroom, and then took off his shoes. But he stumbled when he bent down, and he broke the mirror in the front hall.

            Cursing, he picked up the glass, but instead of taking it to the kitchen trashcan, he took it to the trashcans behind the house. He didn’t come back. My mother sent me outside to look for him, and I saw his footprints in the mud, they lead to my neighbor’s back door, and my father’s shoes that were sitting at them. The bedroom light was on in my neighbor’s house, and she wasn’t married.