Daddy's Journee 20min Short

JOURNEE, a smart and talented beautiful African American young woman, gets a call from her younger half-sister JENNI. Jenni informs Journee of their ill father’s, TONY’S, condition and suggests she come pay her respects and say her goodbyes. Journee having experienced years of turmoil and neglect from Tony is not at all interested or motivated to pay him a visit or give him a peaceful send off. However, after contemplation she reluctantly takes heed to his dilapidation and finally decides to visit him to not say goodbye but to have closure.
Tony was never there for Journee. Her birth came early due to Tony striking her pregnant mother, ANGELA, an African American woman. Angela at the time, endured the abuse as Journee grew older and watched. This exposure incepted Journee into a very volatile and “misfunctional” idea of relationships, an image Journee embedded to be normal.
And then Tony leaves. Walks out this home with a quiet young Journee watching her dad leave without looking back or saying goodbye. He left the imprint of being the standard against which Journee will judge all men.
This visit isn’t your typical loving daddy/daughter reunion. This visit is of pain and purge. Journee confronts her dad exposing all the grief he put on her throughout her childhood to present day. He lays sickly, deathly, very weak under tubes and monitors. She sits by his bedside, moves closer so he can hear her clearly. Journee pulls out an old card and asks Tony if he remembers it. This card was given to Journee from him at her sweet sixteen party. Unbeknownst to her and everyone present, that it would be a card of embarrassment and pain. Journee was excited to receive it and opened it in front of her guests. As she reads the letter, the letter becomes a nightmare. Tony wrote to her what a father should never impose on his own child, the question of their existence and expression of not being wanted.
Journee recounts to Tony the anguish he bestowed as he laid remaining not to care. She cries out her feelings, and flashes back to all the circumstances and events that leads her to this moment. From seeing her mother being continuously attacked, to having also experience the same fate in her own relationships with men including rape, she breaks down. Tony still doesn’t react to her pain and attempts to reach for the nurse call button remote. Insulted, Journee swiftly moves it away from him and becomes even angrier. She aggressively leans over and whispers to Tony she doesn’t care what happens to him. Journee grabs his tubes and squeezes them causing Tony to breath laboriously until the flat line sounds are heard.
A death occurred. A funeral follows. Journee’s younger half-sister, Jenni is at the podium greeting the mourners. She addresses them sorrowfully and speaks on love and the absence of it. Her words spoke on depression, neglect, pain, and suicide. She pulls out a note and reads from it.
The note is from Journee. Journee died that day at the hospice after having her closure with Tony. She clinched Tony’s cords only to find her own death. The monitors were triggered yet did not kill Tony. She went into the hospice room’s bathroom, gave a long last stare at herself and swallowed her fate. Pills were taken to take her life.
Her best friend, MAXWELL, an African American male accompanied Journee for the visit. He waited outside of Tony’s hospice room as Journee confronted her dad. Always being by her side since childhood, he knew she needed him and he was there for her. What he didn’t know was her plan to end her journey. Journee stumbled out of the room to the hallway where Maxwell is standing waiting. She collapses and he rushes to catch her. As she was dying, she handed Maxwell a note to give to her half-sister Jenni. Maxwell could not believe he was losing his troubled friend. Journee died in his arms.