It´s hard to remember that our lives are such a short time... when it takes such a long time

I am killing myself with every puff I take; christ I sound like a QUIT commercial! I woke this morning with the sensation that there was something there, something on the wall of my lung and no matter how much I coughed it wouldn't dislodge. Maybe it's cancer. Maybe I want another fucking cigarette!

I've been thinking a lot about the past lately, about my relationship with my father before he died. I remember when I was maybe 10 or 11, about a year before he died, we were sharing a caravan because my grandmother was staying with us and so they put her in my room and I got to sleep in a rented caravan that sat in our driveway. It was my mum's brilliant idea that my father sleep in there too. Maybe she thought it would be our chance to bond or maybe they were fighting. I don't recall.

We didn't. Yeah that pretty much sums up that week. We didn't talk, communicate, nothing, we just went to bed and slept. I remember I was reading some boy-fiction about conservationists in Africa battling poachers to save some mountain gorillas and just as my father turned the lights out, I wished that just once that he would talk to me. Did he hate me? I thought about telling him that I might be gay, then at least that would get a reaction out of him. It's funny how something so trivial, so long ago can just come up like reflux and feel so raw. I wonder though, had he known that he was going to be dead in a little over a year, how those nights in the caravan would have passed.