When his mother died Alex saw his father stare into the distance until the ash hanging from his cigarette became a fragile gray arc as long as his pinky finger. He sometimes thought of the cigarette and about the dry tobacco burning inside. It came to him when he wished it wouldn’t. He worried that, like the cigarette, something had burned away when his mother died, leaving only the shape of him behind. Alex knew his mother’s death meant that his father would want to move. Moving was the way his father dealt with hardship, loss, and embarrassment. It was his pattern, an immutable blueprint repeated more times than Alex could count. When faced with obstacles, obstacles of any kind, his father’s response was to flee, to pull up what few stakes they had driven into the ground and move on. It was as if by the simple act of moving, their troubles would stay put, with the distance acting as a cleansing agent. Like so many other things they never discussed, Alex assumed his father viewed each move as a fresh start. Yet Alex never felt fresh after each move. He felt the opposite: dirty. He felt like a quitter. In his view, moving accomplished nothing except further cementing the habit of moving. Only on occasion did Alex feel the infractions against his father were such that quitting his job was …show more content…
Alex learned to travel light, to not accumulate too many possessions or hold onto things strongly. He grew up without experiencing the emotions other kids – children with roots – seemed to take for granted: the joys and sorrows of long-term friendships; the confusion and significance of social cliques and their endless minute adjustments; enduring hardship with peers that could forge bonds as strong as any, and stronger than most. Instead, Alex became a loner, a transient figure who briefly lingered in the lives of others. He became a backdrop, a prop on the stage in someone else’s