From the writing prompt "Your dad is back from the store after thirteen years, with no time seeming to have passed for him."
Thirteen and a half years ago, my dad went out the the store. He said it was for milk, it was actually for a pack of smokes, none of that is super relevant.
Six months ago, he came home.
It was... uncomfortable, at first. Mom had remarried. I had a boyfriend, and dad hadn't had the luxury of a half decade to come to terms with me being super gay. We'd remodeled the upstairs at one point, and replaced the front lawn with a less water-sucking courtyard. General improvements made over time, that added up to an alien home to someone who was out of their own era.
But he was back. He was home. My dad. I couldn't be mad or awkward forever; I'd loved him, and still did. He was always there for me, until the day he wasn't.
There is, with humans, an imperative to search for a cause to something. Why, we ask. Why is the sun so bright, why is the sky blue? Why does this bird live here and this one does not? Why am I sick, and why can't we fix it?
Why did a human man, age thirty nine, drop off the face of the world for thirteen long years, and come back as if nothing had happened?
Fuck, he even brought back that beat up old pickup he loved. Loves.
So we started looking. I took time off work. Mom canceled her vacation plans. Even Devon, her husband who had been starting to feel more and more like a 'dad', sat with us when we needed an extra head, and gave us polite space when it became uncomfortable. He and dad got along really well, though, which was surprising. Dad was taking this whole thing kinda well. Maybe he was just delightfully surprised good smartphones existed.
But after six months, what it was looking like was that there was no why. There was no greater plan to this. No magic, no divine intervention, no summoning from another dimension. No curse, hex, pact, or glitch in the matrix. There were no anomalous energy readings, no quantum fluctuations, no... anything. There was just something that had happened. Once. And never again.
Until we found the support group.
I went with dad sometimes, other times he went on his own, when he said he needed space. I always felt my heart skip a beat when that happened, because I remembered what happened the last time he left the house alone. It was a meetup group at the local library, every Saturday afternoon, for people who... well, there wasn't a blanket term. For people like my dad.
People who had their whole lives upended in an instant, from something that didn't make sense. They talked, they commiserated, they cried together. They found something there that I didn't fully understand had been lost, but that they all needed.
Cassandra was the woman who started the group. She'd been dead for most of her life, and was still coming to terms with how that even worked. Her husband was really amazing, always there for her, even when he'd just attended her funeral again. She told us, "There are some things in the world that we don't understand yet. And there are some things in the world we don't want to understand. But then, there's those things that understanding slides around, like oil and water. We're those."
I'd spent the next week calling my dad "Oily" with a big old grin, until he'd laughingly tossed me into the community swimming pool with a throw that I remembered from my childhood, and suddenly felt the pain of missing again. We'd stopped laughing, but not stopped understanding each other then.
There were other people who came and went from the group. Bob, who sometimes got to relive days, but not in any particular order. He'd always tell us if he'd looped, to be polite, and offer up advice on who shouldn't buy lottery scratchers. Mars was less polite; a young person from another Earth, who had a lot of cultural adaptation to do. She yelled a lot. Or Louis, who'd found a really, really old coin that made him consume wi-fi and microwave radiation for some reason.
My favorite though was the guy my age, Indri. He said he'd been cursed, which was actually kind of hard to take, because curses implied magic, which implied it could be repeated. That sort of systemic thing was really uncomfortable, almost distressing, to the rest of the group. They didn't just think that our problems were one-offs, they needed them to be unique. If only so we could know it wasn't happening to anyone else. Not like we ever would with Indri. I don't actually know his actual name, I just write something different, because everything written or recorded about him blanks itself after a while. It took me a while to figure out that I have to treat him as a hypothetical, or a fictional character to get anything to stick. Makes it hard to keep up a friendship with him, but we're getting coffee after the group this weekend, so it must be working.
I know all of this sounds like it doesn't have a point, or like there's disappointment that there wasn't some grand plot, or colossal family drama, or a big twist to it. Maybe there will be, eventually. But there is a point. My dad's back. He's having trouble adjusting, but he's back. My dad, who I thought was either dead or an asshole for thirteen years, is home again. He bought that damn milk, he carried it through thirteen impossible years, and he made it back to an unfamiliar world. But he did it.
And life goes on.
I'm gonna go hug my dad now.