With all of the family drama that has been happening lately, this short story I wrote last year has been lingering in my mind. It needs a little work, but here is Part One of Skin Deep.

The beginning is always the hardest part. After all, who is to say where the story begins? Sometimes there is an obvious, definitive eureka! moment, but more often than not you’re left feeling like I am right now… I know what my story is, I know how it ended, but where did it begin? At what point did I realise that this was a story that was worth telling? When did my tale begin?

I suppose you could say that it started when Grandfather got back from his adventure to faraway lands. Honestly, when he goes off on an adventure, none of us are sure exactly where he goes. But really, although he was sick when he returned, my story and experiences didn’t happen until much later. Although, it is incredibly hard to pinpoint the exact moment that I thought that something was wrong… that something was seriously different, and that nothing would ever go back to the way that it was… but, really, I should probably stop getting ahead of myself. I think that the beginning was the phone call. That moment when I first felt like the world was crashing around my ears, I just had no idea how truly horrible the following months would be. How much it would change everything in my life, from my everyday experience to the rose-coloured way in which I viewed the world. From blue and green landscapes to the red and black dreams capes that covered my canvases.

None of us were sure what had happened to him, in fact, we’re still in the shadows about what his adventures entailed. Yet, on his arrival home, instead of ringing Mum to organise his welcome-home-visit, a doctor from the local hospital was forced to make that call. Standing in the middle of my lounge room, phone dangling from my fingers, the idea that my infallible, supportive grandfather had succumbed to an illness was unimaginable. Rosco’s constant pressure against my thigh was all that kept me from falling over. The reverberating shock of my Mum’s distraught voice echoing through my sluggish brain. I was convinced that it was all just a horrible joke. But it wasn’t the 1^st of April.

It was the not knowing, the not understanding just what had happened that was the worst. After all, it is impossible to create a plan of attack, a way to manage the situation if you’re not entirely sure what the situation even is. I’m honestly not sure if hours passed, or just seconds as I stood, absorbing the information in horror. Yet, eventually Rosco decided that I had stayed frozen for long enough, his insistence that it was time for his dinner finally broke through the reprieve and bought me crashing back to reality. It was his trusting love and ability to give me his unerring loyalty and love that helped to see me through the dusk that followed.

Finally, we started to get news from the doctors, I will never forget the moment that I walked into the hospital room. The towering giant was a feeble midget, unable to see, hear or experience anything that was happening around him. I could never understand how someone of so much mass could fit into such a small space. It took everything that I had to not burst into tears the moment I saw him prone in the middle of a sterile, unfeeling room. It wasn’t long after that afternoon that the anger started – no matter what the nursing staff did to help, nothing was ever good enough. I would come almost every day with my Mum, but I was never around enough. The only person he didn’t constantly berate was Mum.

As with everything in life, the more you do something, the more it feels like a routine. The appointments began to blur into one, the endless monotony of hospital hallways – normal. I spent the nights attempting to create the calming gauche landscapes that had always been my bread and butter. Yet, those beautiful moments that I had always captured so easily lingered at the tip of my brush – there was no way to transfer them onto the stretched material on the easel. Nights flashed by as I stared at my blank future.

Two weeks flashed past my eyes, Rosco continued to rouse me from my artistic frustration – eating became a chore, yet, we all plodded on. I made it my mission to force food down my mother’s throat – regardless of how hungry she felt. The kilos were just falling off of her, the haggard look of the unhealthy carving out the terror she was living with. Forcing colour into her cheeks was an obtainable goal and my focus quickly narrowed down to that very existence. Even my paintings start to take on elements of the necessity of food – starving creatures lingering amongst the trees of orchards, fields of food walled in by human degradation. Everything was illuminated by the presence of despair.

Even though we were constantly dealing with the shuck of a creature that had been left by his unknown accident, it wasn’t until the week after we finally got him home that I started to truly wonder when things would get back to normal. After all, it was six weeks to the day since he had returned. His pallor had returned. His ability to talk in complete sentences. Even his ability to get up and walk around everyday had increased so drastically that we weren’t even worried about leaving him alone for an hour or two (eventually). The temperature of the room seemed to drop whenever he entered – he was incapable of doing anything for himself.

Maybe that’s the true beginning of my story. It’s not about what came before, it’s not even about what happened over there. It’s about those weeks leading up to that one, final horrific event. That realisation that the truth was staring me in the face the entire time. And I did nothing to stop it.