Confounded: Part III - Prologue. Prologue

2022 - Summer

Taking exit 42B from the San Diego Freeway, I turned right to drive into Redondo Beach, following the autonavigator as it directed me. I was heading toward the new HQ offices of BSL Communications. This would actually be my first time visiting there since the company moved here a week ago from Santa Ana, where I’d begun twenty two years ago.

Having handed over the reins to my son Kit, back in 2019, some six months before Covid-19 hit the world, a lot has changed. Deeming the Santa Ana location too small, Kit put his own stamp on things with his eye fixed on expansion and began looking for other HQ locations. After a very long search he found it here. What possibly also played into that was that it was much closer to his home and children.

Yes, I am a grandfather now! Allow me to proudly present my two boys, Noah and Julian, 5 and 3 respectively. I glanced at my phone, its background displaying the both of them making scary faces at the camera, a picture taken a month ago at my house. Mischa, their other parent, referred to them quite often as ‘the terrorists’. They were that. Two little terrors.

As soon as I turned into the street and saw the building I couldn’t deny that it was a big step up from our old offices. For one, it was far bigger and more modern, with two stories and secondly, Kit had bought the building while we’d been renting the Santa Ana location. There was also a big car park in front of the building (always a problem, parking, at the old offices), with enough room for both visitors and employees to park. It was a smart move. Our warehouse was much closer to here as well. I’d have to ask Kit how he had found this place.

Parking my car, I turned off the engine and looked up at the building. There was a big sign on the roof with only ‘BSL’ on it, and our new logo. Kit had dropped ‘Communications’ from the name, finding it outdated but I remember his feeling conflicted because he didn’t want to hurt my feelings on it. To his credit, he did try to involve me in the decision making and, though appreciated, I couldn’t have cared less, back then.

Because my husband of eleven years was no more. I lost Taylan.

In the summer of 2019 he passed away; acute leukemia.

The process was quick, too quick. Merciful, some might say, but for me far too quick. There was no time to say goodbye. To say ‘I love you’ one more time. Six weeks after diagnosis was all we had and the brightest of stars was diminished forever. I miss him still, three years later.

It was then that Kit became the man he was raised to be; an anchor in a stormy harbor when I couldn’t even so much as float. He came through while raising a baby and a toddler at home, taking over leadership of BSL without asking. He just went with it and that young man became what I could no longer be; the patriarch for the family, his husband and two sons, and myself because for me the joy of life went...away. Nothing could really excite me, move me. Yes, I did make promises to Taylan, promises you can’t possibly say no to, when asked; don’t linger in grief too long, go back to work, continue living and find someone else (fuck. off!). I did continue to live, just breathe in and out, eat and sleep, and I did go back to work eventually but everything was just dull. Numb. No joy.

Then Covid hit the world and that suited me just fine. Life stopped, people were scared to come near one another and that was perfect for me: with the best of intentions, people ask if you’re alright. I quickly began to hate ‘How are you?’, finding it the most horrible of questions. I didn’t dare say ‘I’m good’ or ‘I’m fine’, because who says that, when you’ve lost your partner? At the same time, you also don’t want to say ‘not so good’, because you don’t want to see that sympathetic facial expression and the ensuing inevitable hug, much less the standard platitudes you’ve heard regurgitated toward you for a thousand times by then. So you keep to yourself, you avoid it. Well, I did.

Not that I was ungrateful for any of it, but it was too confronting; it reminded me again and again that Taylan was gone. So Covid? Blessing for me. I moped around the house and got stuck, residing in memory lane, getting overloaded on generous portions of fresh hell whenever I picked up an item or looked at a picture. Watching TV and smirking at a scene, then turning sideways to see his reaction. And yep, fresh hell once again.

I wish I could say, looking back, that I had been what Taylan had expected of me, asked me to promise; be strong and pick up life, rule the ‘empire’ I built. But I was that man no longer and it took me almost a year to find my will to just live.

It was my eldest grandson, Noah, who made that happen.

I’ll never forget that afternoon; ‘forced’ to babysit one day (Mischa later admitted that it had been his idea to feign an emergency, to at least get me out of the house), I found myself caring for them with both their parents out for the day and no one to fall back on. Just me, them and “Wall-E”. They cried and fussed until, at the end of my rope, I just pushed a random DVD into the player, pressed ‘play’ and watched in astonishment at the events unfolding on the screen, the two terrors watching with rapt attention. The scene where he presses the car alarm and it goes off somewhere? His reaction still makes me laugh; that quick ‘where’d that come from’ look. That was the first time I really, genuinely laughed, like belly laughing, full roaring. The boys looked at me as if I was insane, then cackled along with me as I kept rewinding to that scene.

Slowly I returned among the living, engaging more in their lives first, accepting invitations to come by more often, join a BBQ, going to church (though I never stopped doing that), the latter becoming a weekly thing. Taking it one day at a time, I eventually woke from that period of lethargy and found myself quite obsolete at BSL; Kit had pressed too much of his own stamp on things in my absence, so much so that I felt surplus at my own company. It didn’t feel as mine anymore and I was really okay with that. So I handed over the reins officially and stepped back.

These days, Kit sometimes asks me to travel somewhere for business so that he can remain with his family, like taking older clients to dinner with whom I still had a good, professional relationship, or travel abroad so he didn’t have to, and sort out issues that arose. As a favor to my son, and Mischa, let’s not forget him and, not in a small amount, as a thank you, for all that they had done when I didn’t even know what day it sometimes was.

It was my guess also that Kit called me to come in today, to ask me to go on another trip, somewhere in the world. It’d been a few months since I’d gone traveling for BSL. That might actually be nice. The last one had been to Sydney, late last year.

Getting out of the car, I made my way to the entrance of the building and headed in.