I think one of life’s sickest jokes is loving your father.
You are constantly torn between hating him for all his cruelties and feeling sympathy towards his grievances that pushed him to make them.
I am simultaneously a 23 year old woman burning with resentment and an 8 year old girl holding the fire extinguisher that her dad taught her to use.
He is everywhere even as he is nowhere, and it makes me miss him in the same way that I miss the dead.
You cannot escape the shared blood that pulses through your veins.
Or the familiar brown eyes and bridged nose that stares back at you in your reflection, all yours but have never really felt like yours.
It follows you every day of your life, like something in your shoe that you can’t seem to get out,
Or an itch on your scalp that you can’t quite scratch,
Or a ghost.
And you can try to act tough, even say you were better off not wallowing in his presence.
But you will always just be a kid crying at school because you want your dad.
Like father like daughter they say,
And maybe in a way that’s true.
For he taught me many things, the biggest of all being who I did not want to be.
So don’t look for him in the way I look,
Look for him in the way I stay.
In the way I love.
In the way I forgive.
In the way I apologize for things I never did.
So where do you go from there?
The hatred, the attachment, the forced tie and connection?
Well, to continue on living you either have to forget him or forgive him, and a part of you dies with the decision no matter the choice.
And the one put to death is that little girl who both loves him and was ruined by him.
She is the sacrifice.
She has always been the sacrifice.
And that is really life’s sickest joke.
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