No Rest for Natalie at Home

Pull yourself together… Pull yourself together…

She kept repeating the same mantra to herself while she struggled to insert the key into the lock and open the door to her apartment. Finally managing to do so, she took off her shoes by the entrance and closed the door behind her.

"Natalie, is that you?" Her uncle said in his usual drunken voice.

"...Yes, Uncle. It's me."

She heard him starting one of his monologues about having to live with a girl who knew no boundaries, leaving before sunrise and returning around midnight.

Look who's talking about boundaries.

"You're such a hypocrite," she whispered under her breath and made her way to the kitchen to open a can of soda, it was the first thing to enter her throat the entire miserable day.

"Did you pay the electricity bill?" Her uncle asked from behind the opened fridge door.

Unable to believe her ears, she closed the fridge and stared up at him. Maybe it was her inability to smell alcohol on someone after what had happened to her a while ago or maybe it was how much she had imagined her uncle's birthday going differently, but for whatever reason, she reached the limit of her patience right then.

"No, I did not pay the electricity bill!" she snapped, "Did you ever consider stopping to ask yourself if I had the money to pay the bills before questioning whether I actually paid them? Or better yet, did you ever think about making just a small effort to cut down on drinking every day so we wouldn't struggle to get through the month?"

His face became very red very quickly.

"Shame on you! Coming back at this hour of the night and still having the nerve to lecture me about how I spend my days! What have you been doing until this hour, huh? Didn't you make some money the entire day? Shouldn't you be grateful that I don't ask you how you made that money in the first place!"

"How I made it? How… How I made it?"

She bit her lips hard, releasing them only when the pain became unbearable.

"I had to borrow money from those filthy men downstairs just so I could afford a better phone that wouldn't embarrass me when I'm on a stage singing or dancing for a living!"

Reaching into her bag, she took out the broken phone and waved it in her uncle's face.

"Look at it now! Won't you ask how my new phone ended up like this? Do you even care about me or what happens to me out there even a little?"

"I raised you!" he shouted. "I put food on your table and clothes on your back for years! I gave you my life, you ungrateful thing! And now that you're all grown up, you think it's too much for me to bury my misery at the bottom of a bottle? Where did that misery come from, Natalie? Where!"

She swallowed back tears.

"…You're drunk and you don't know what you're saying, but the words and their underlying meanings still hurt."

Her uncle, suddenly sobering up, looked confused.

"Natalie, I—"

"Don't. Just don't say anything else."

She hurried out of the kitchen with the can of soda in her hand and entered her room then closed and locked the door behind her. Her eyes immediately drifted up to the portrait of her father over her bed.

"…Why?" She asked, blinking the tears away. "Why did you have to leave me so early?"

Wishing he had either taken her with him or had never passed away, Natalie placed the can over her bedside table. She then climbed onto her bed, brought down the portrait of her father and hugged it.

I miss you...

Sobbing into her pillow, Natalie felt the hard wooden frame biting into the flesh of her arms. It reminded her of her father's warm and delicate touches that used to soothe and comfort her. Her heart was filled with more than a decade-old grief.

Natalie's father was the one wound that just would not heal—the only man ever worthy of her love. The world was ugly without him, but she was still condemned to carry on living.

'Live' was the final word her father uttered in that crushed car before he passed away in front of Natalie's eyes.