SOTF Archive/SOTF Classic

Tim wasn't exactly sure where it went wrong.

Paul and Sheila Tavares got hitched on a rainy sunday. The honeymoon, it was spent in California. Sunny Hollywood, California, and off the coast on some beach, Paul and Sheila rode on some speedboat. Didn't matter what the details of the speedboat were, Tim wasn't even born yet. What mattered was, Paul looked his newlywed wife in the eye and said:

"I will always love you and I will never leave you."

Sheila believed him. She believed him when he came home late at night, breath heavy with alcohol, collar pulled up to hide the hickeys on the side of his neck, saying he was at a business meeting. Believed him when he was at her bedside at Tim's birth- on the phone. Believed him when he would flat out look at Tim and, while he didn't say it, quite clearly wanted to say "What a mistake." Believed him when he said, "I'm sorry, this just isn't working for us."

Believed him when he finalized the divorce papers.

Sheila even believed him when not even six months later she was fired by the same man she had called her husband.

Her son didn't believe, especially not when his own flesh and blood got hitched with some blonde bimbo.

For a lot of people, marriage is just another word for tax break.


When he comes home to his flat in Rainier Valley, in the ghetto of Seattle, he sees his mother struggling to keep a smile despite struggling to pay the bills, he sees the drywall peeling and the ceiling leaking, and all he can really feel his hate. And it comes to him that his emotion, it really isn't hate, right?

This is how the world works.

It was a realization, an epiphany.

It was something more scarring than hate.