With or Without You

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, it is really easy for me to imagine my mom without my dad. The story goes that they met when she was 13, and married with children before she even finished secondary school. But I have lived most of my life with them apart. And even if my mom wanted to, she couldn’t change that.
I didn’t dare ask for a picture of my dad. No, I found this picture last weekend, in a dusty beaten up shoebox, among the rest of my father’s stuff that even my mother couldn’t throw out; his journals, cufflinks, and the pictures she took of him in his bedroom on The Way. This was one of them.
To my understanding, and process of elimination, this picture was probably taken in the late 90s, later than ‘97 because my dad didn’t have his long Kurt Cobain grunge bed head hair, but obviously earlier than 2000 because he was away on weapons inspection that year. So somewhere in between, my mom and dad would stay in his tiny flat all day drawing, smoking, and spending their limited time with each other, being that my dad was on leave.
He’s sitting on his mattress that lays directly on the floor because he couldn’t afford a bed frame. But who needs one anyway, when you’re only home 2 weeks at time. Pen in hand he looks deep in thought, mid sentence when my mom snapped this. Probably telling her one of his many stories, one that she she can tell her friends when he’s away. Or maybe he’s just explaining the meaning behind his next tattoo. Either way, she was probably hanging onto every word. He only has one tattoo in this picture but he was buried with over fifty. He’d always talk about his ink, the permanent memories that he got, imagining how wonderful he’d feel looking at them at 90, wrinkled and faded. But that never happened. Each tattoo symbolised everything he truly loved; like the one of my initials over his heart. But he never had one for her.
Now he’s gone. And the only thing she remembers him by are the pictures hidden away in dusty beaten up shoeboxes. But I wouldn’t know because for me, there wasn’t much mom without dad, and there wasn’t enough mom with dad too.