That Time Robin Williams Died and I Saw My Mother On A Night Out In Ibiza

I don’t expect to run into my mother on the Ibiza strip surrounded by drunks and neon lights and all the things she warned me against, I don’t expect her to be there in a tube top on the other side of the bar talking to a man half her age and laughing like she did when I was five, when dad took us to the top of a mountain and said he was going to jump off only he forgot to say that he had a parachute, so we cried and cried as his body went woosh towards the ground, and then when the thing opened and he stopped midair, impossibly, saved, we fell about laughing and cheering and thanking the God we forgot we believed in because now we had a dad for a few more years, the dad who would eventually grow tired of our boring life and go off searching for higher mountains to jump off with smaller and smaller parachutes until they phoned us up one day to identify his remains, as if blood and bones and fear were all that had made him up, and we said yeah, it was him, and I left for good because my mother was depressed and couldn’t love a broken family, which was the last time I saw her until now, so I order another drink and watch her out of the corner of my eye, pretending to watch the news where they’re announcing the death of another comedian and maybe I’m too drunk or maybe I’m only half paying attention because of what’s going on with my mother but it takes me a beat to realize they’re talking about Robin Williams, so I pause for a minute and say shit out loud and wait for everyone else to stop what they’re doing and take a minute of silence or something but they don’t, they go on dancing and kissing and fighting like they’re in Night at The Museum, and my mother, even she isn’t paying attention because now her head is bent down and she’s sniffing coke out of a bag until the man she’s with puts it away and squeezes her arm and I wait for her to flinch but she doesn’t, instead she smiles and says something that could be fuuuuuck or could be a scream for help and the man laughs so I think about killing him, how people die all the time in places like this and maybe then I could get my mother back, I would tell her how things didn’t go so well after I left and how it was probably me who sold the man his coke, and I would long for her to beat me for straying so far from the path that she started and failed to lay for me, but then I remember Robin Williams and how death immortalizes people in some fucked up way and I don’t want to give the guy stealing my mother that power, Robbie understood this, Mr Willy to his mates, he knew how life was just a bunch of drunks and neon lights and all the things you were meant to hate but secretly loved and the only way to deal with it all is to get high and hope that someone else saw things differently, which is what my dad did with his endless jumps and what mother is doing now with the coke and the young man on her arm and what everyone else is doing by being here, trying to get lost in the music and each other and forget why they wanted to come in the first place.