Like Father, Like Daughter

It’s a Tuesday. You sit cross legged on the floor before me, hunched over a piece of paper. Your glasses slip down your nose, and you shove them up impatiently. Like I do. 

The paper bleeds your messy scrawl. Equations and arrows looping back on themselves, as if chasing their own tails. Tuesdays are for Economics. Your subject. You’re convinced it’s mine too. It isn’t, but I can pretend. 

For a moment, it’s almost sweet, this mirroring. The way you chew your lip when thinking, like me. The way your fingers tap restless rhythms against the floor. We are echoes of each other, even in the smallest, careless things. Like father, like daughter. 

And you’re talking. Explaining, brusquely, as if you’re teaching this for the fifth time. Outside, a car door slams. Someone laughs. The world keeps moving and we're stuck in this suspended moment. You wait for understanding to dawn. I wait for the storm. 

Instead I hear a pencil. Supply sloping up, demand sloping down. A clean X marks where they meet. Equilibrium. You say the word like it's sacred.

I think of shattered porcelain. I’m watching salt water pool on a wooden table. One day you’ll lose everything, your voice echoes in my head. And I’ll be waiting. Are you still waiting? I suppose not.

I count your apologies in my mind. I can never find one for that day. I flip past cracked mirrors and stained shirts, but I never find one for spilt coffee. I haven’t had any since. You drink a cup every morning. 

For me, it was the day you split my childhood in half. For you, another Tuesday. How easily a father forgets he built the heart he breaks. 

You finally hear my silence, and the scribbling stops. “Are you with me?”, you say. Almost asking, if I didn’t know you better. I force the memory down my throat, and pray you can’t see it in my eyes.

Of course I’m with you. I’m always with you. Even when you weren’t with me.

The sun slants through gossamer curtains, painting stripes across the distance between us. For now, the thunder holds. For now, so do we.

Like father, like daughter.

Vedika Sengupta