The Great Forever

08:59

Well this was a surprise no matter of fact it was surreal, I felt like I was seeing a ghost or hallucinating. Sitting down in the creaky metal chair, I took a deep breath and stared at the eyes that used to look at me with so much joy and hope. There was no way to describe my emotions, I was happy but sad, floating but drowning at an all to continuous rate. Eye contact not breaking, I took the creme phone on the side of the wall and brought it to my ear, "Hello Henry." Calm and steady, I couldn't slip up in front of him. "I'm surprised you're here since the last time we spoke, it was quite physical."

The sound of punching is playing in my head. God, I didn't know how many punches he got in before they pulled him away from me. "Get up and fight you piece of shit! you want to talk about sorry— sorry? *punch, punch, punch* Did you feel sorry when you killed my daughter, or when you belittled and manipulated her to the point that you couldn't see that you were the reason why she was depressed and had changed? There were tears streaming down his cheeks and for the first time in all my life, I witnessed the breaking point of a grown man. And just as though a switch turned off, the punching and the yelling came to a standstill.

"I'm surprised I'm here too Elias, it took a lot of strength to come here and restraint from not killing you myself." Henry had aged a lot from the last time I saw him, I guess that's what happens to you after you suffer loss and are left to mourn for the dead. His once fully brown locs were now peppered colored, and his posture lagged showing how haggard he had become. In front of me was the shell of a man I once knew, and not of the man he had become. "You know before all of this happened...I thought that I was the problem Kea had transformed into a different person. I thought I wasn't showing her enough love or that maybe school was becoming hard on her until I met you." Henry looked at me with disgust, but then pity and finally sadness. "You were charming, but there was something about you that just didn't fit no matter how hard you tried to mask it. I thought you were just an awkward kid that meant no harm to my daughter, but boy was I wrong." He laughed to himself, in a way that screamed regret.

Leaning into the phone I counted backward from ten, took a deep breath, then spoke, "I loved Kea, she didn't change because of me, you're just telling lies. Meaningless lies." It was hard keeping my cool around Henry, he was always blaming me for Kea's actions and the reason why this happened when I didn't mean or want to kill her, she brought those consequences upon herself. "She was everything to me. You can't act like you were the best person in her life either, where were you all those nights that she came home to an empty house and had to spend weeks alone? Oh, that's right the goddamn bar at motel 6, where you drowned your fucking sorrows." Kea might've been a happy-go-lucky person to the outside world but on the inside, she was broken, each piece of her shattered into a million pieces. "Every time you left, I was the one putting her back together."

"I may have been a shitty parent, but I also wasn't the one that ended up killing her." Henry's grasp onto sanity was slipping, but his hard tone and rapid movement of his fingers were keeping him down. "I didn't come here to argue Elias, I came here to say that I forgive you — not because you deserve it, but because it's the only way that I can move on." And with that, Henry put the phone up, pushed his chair back, and left.

Henry was the second person to ever forgive me, the first was Kea, but after all that I had done and said, he forgave me. I was a piece of shit, I didn't deserve forgiving I deserved a beating.

The guards took me back to my room after Henry left. I couldn't stop thinking about our conversation and the last time a pair of honey-brown eyes once told me the same thing.

"I forgive you."