Heaven can wait we're only watching the skies
Hoping for the best, but expecting the worst
Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?
After eleven and a half straight hours on the road, two stops at two different petrol stations to refuel and piss (better forget that part, seriously, ew) and a fast food restaurant in which the guy from the counter had been giving you the creeps, it hit you that maybe this whole trip was a mistake. A stupid huge mistake. No one but your mom and Bill (who insisted that you should take his old '68 Mercury Cougar because “cool girls must ride cool cars”, as he’d said) knew that you were there, in Hawkins, Indiana. Seven hundred and thirty-seven miles from your home in New York. Not even your father, James “Jim” Hopper, knew you were there.
You’d have told him the news the last time you talked with Jim on the phone, but you didn’t. How and what exactly were you supposed to do it anyway? “Hey Jim, by the way, I know we only talked to each other to wish our respective birthdays, on Thanksgiving and on Christmas, but... You know what? I'm going to live with you! Yay! Don't you think it's going to be super fun living with your almost adult daughter that you haven't seen in centuries for a whole year?” That was totally a nope.
Even calling him ‘dad’ would still have felt strange at that time. You were only twelve years old when Sarah, your little sister, passed away, and Jim had decided that the best way to deal with her death was running away almost to the other side of the country. You’ve tried not to blame him for getting away from you and your mom. Although for a while you did, especially when his calls were becoming less frequent. It hurt a lot.
Eventually, you had learned to deal with a drunk and depressed Jim, but every call of his was like a stab wound. And that wound opened up a little more with each whine of his calling Sarah.
“Oh, Sarah, my poor little Sarah,” he used to cry while you kept quiet.
Somewhere in the five years that had passed, your mom stopped crying. Bill and the baby helped her to move on. But what about Jim? You had been wondering how he’d look like at that moment, where he’d be living... Would he still be drinking? Would he still pour mayonnaise on hot dogs like Sarah used to?
“Are you kidding me? Who puts mayonnaise on hot dogs? Ew!”, you used to argue as Jim grabbed the pot of mayonnaise laughing.