when i was eleven, my father was driving me home,
and we decided, spur-of-the-moment,
to look for a swimming hole in our new town.
we spent an hour driving around, listening to classic rock,
choosing random roads and turns and laughing,
until suddenly there was tension in the car,
and i knew immediately to stop talking,
because when my father grew angry,
the people around him knew to shrink away, silent.
most of my relationship with him fell into this pattern:
christmas shopping followed by broken snowglobes,
stories read at night and then screaming in the morning,
basketball at the park until the game turned to anger and fear,
my siblings and i all shutting down, everyone disconnected
by our father’s ability to disappear & be replaced by someone else
who we wished was a stranger, but wasn’t.
he was a writer, a dreamer. even now, when there is a pen in my hands,
i wonder if i owe it to him. if without his guidance,
maybe i would sneer at poetry and shrug at novels,
or be incapable of stringing a sentence together.
there are days - weeks, months, once a full year -
where that left me disgusted with myself, with my love of art,
with an inability to write for fear of becoming like him.
my whole life is colored by my father. his moods, his stories,
his ups and his downs, his love and his cruelty,
his laughter and his anger, his hands and his fists.
for five years, i did not speak to him. didn’t see him. but i thought of him.
and then, in the last year before the cancer claimed his life,
i started trying again. and it was hard. it never got easier.
the looming figure of my childhood, all muscle and scream and strength,
the man who left me terrified of other men, of raised voices,
of sudden movements - he had become a shell.
a shriveled, shrunken old man, words hardly above a whisper,
unable to stay awake for more than a few hours at a time.
the night he went to the hospital, my brother and his girlfriend left first.
my own girlfriend and i sat with him, speaking quietly, holding hands.
i talked about mark twain and how my father used to read tom sawyer,
every night, and how he taught me to type, taught me to throw a punch,
taught me to cook and read and write. how i loved those things.
how i’d watched him draw concepts for the novel he never finished,
and even at five years old, wanted to do that. to be that. an artist.
it was the first time in years i spoke of him without shutting down,
without thinking, mostly, of what he’d done. to me. to my family.
eventually i stopped speaking, again, because it hurt.
i didn’t know what else to say, or how to say anything, really.
before we left, he held his hand out to me, said, ‘wait.’
i did, stomach turning, until he caught his breath, and told me:
‘literature is art. it is.’
and i nodded, and i left, and that night i cried, my girlfriend held me,
i pictured the father from my childhood next to the one i’d just left.
i loved him, and i hated him. i missed him, and i was disgusted by him.
how do you sum up a man like my father?
so dynamic, so lost, so determined to do right,
and yet so willing to do wrong.
so human. so overwhelmingly human. so - so something.
yousharknotpass
romaincrisis
2087
germansingergirl