Age Eleven
“Come on, Dominic, grab your backpack. We have to go.” Dominic doesn’t move. Instead, he kneels on his carpet pushing his car along a track he made from electrical tape on his threadbare rug.
“Did you hear me? Come on, or we’ll be late.”
“So what.”
“So what your red butt if you keep talking back to me, that’s what.”
“Why do we have to go to school for five days?”
“Because those are the rules,” I snap, reaching for the car in his hand.
“Who makes the rules?”
“People.”
“What people?”
“Dom,” I sigh as he pulls it out of reach. “We don’t have time for this shit.”
“Then tell me who makes the rules.”
“I told you, people.”
“Why do we have to listen to people?”
“Because they made the rules.”
“We can make our own rules. Papa said so.”
I pause. He hasn’t talked much about our parents lately, nor recalled his memories of them, but I always try to engage when he does to keep them fresh.
“Papa said we have to make our own rules, or the bad guys will win.”
“He said that?”
“Yes. School for two days.”
“It doesn’t work like that, Dominic.”
“Why?”
“Dom,” I grit out and snatch the car from his hand. His lip quivers with anger as he looks up at me. “We are people. We can make rules, so the bad guys don’t win.”
He looks up to me with such conviction that for those few seconds—I believe him. I’ll believe anything he tells me.
“Then maybe one day we’ll change them.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
The hairs on my neck rise as storm clouds cover the sun on the horizon. The sea rages below as the rogue waves roll over the silky sand in front of me, a strong and fitting parallel to the way things happened. For a majority of that night, I stood out in my clearing as Dominic’s words circled my head, the simplicity and brilliance of them—a heavy implication to the solution of every problem.
Change the rules.
His words triggered a butterfly effect and supplied me with some of my first notes, the first images for the composition of my blueprint, the ignition that sparked the cogs into motion.
I haven’t spoken a word to him since the day he passed—even when I visited his grave because words always failed me—because I felt I failed him.
But it’s different words that have kept me mute over the years. Words Dominic spoke the night he died that haunts me most. Indicative to the way he thought, of what I know he believed about himself, about his fate. Even those who didn’t understand him personally—which were only a select few—could recognize there was something more to him.
I still don’t know what I believe about the afterlife. I hope, and mostly for those I love, that there is a place where nothing is ever left unsaid. That all we suffer to say to those we lose, there’s a place to confess—because I have so much to say.
I run my hands through my hair as I work around the burn in my chest. “Sorry to report school is still five days long.” I shake my head and grin, clearing my throat. “You forced me to take all the credit for being the man behind the curtain, but that’s not how it started, is it, Dom? And I don’t think anyone would believe that it was the suggestion of a five-year-old boy that saw the world for what it is, that set it all into motion.”