Dear Papa Bear,
It’s the twenty fifth of July, in the year 2017.
And I’m writing to the person you were back in 1994. Or maybe I’m writing to the you I left behind in Ohio, with something cold settling where my feet sat in heels that never did fit me right.
I don’t know. Both of them are strangers to me.
I want to see the you I remember, again. The man who wore a donkey kong tshirt, and drank his coffee after forgetting about it for hours while he played crash bandicoot.
The one who let me sit in his lap and drink my kool aid. Who let kate the cat sit with us, even if she was a weird looking stuffed animal.
I miss him every day, you know that? Sometimes I look for him in the photo albums, and i find him. And i miss him even more.
He used to hold my hand, when we walked to the park. Dennis the Menace park, remember? It was near where we lived on base. And he’d kiss the owwies after washing them with cold water from the fountain, and taught me how to rollerblade.
He used to tell me that I could be in the X Games. That dreaming was doing.
I miss him.
I used to fall asleep against him, and trace the bauhaus tattoo on his arm. And I’d ask him what it meant.
And he’d tell me it meant he was still learning. he was still figuring out who he was, and that that was okay.
He’d watch me write, and he’d cheer when I showed him the stories little girls make up in the summer sun.
Sometimes he yelled at me, it happens. He only yelled when he was scared, when I could be hurt. When i was in danger. And he’d scoop me up when I cried so hard my chest hurt, and when my ears leaked blood because genetics was a cruel mistress. And he put warm rags on my neck when it was so swollen I couldn’t swallow. couldn’t breathe.
He made sure to get chocolate chip ice cream after I got out of surgery.
but... daddy, he went away. I don’t know why he went away. I was a good girl. I was a winner. I brought home awards.
Who are you?
Who did you become?
Why?
It’s... easier to joke about now. It’s easier to laugh about your “punishments” for “dirty girls”. Easy to laugh about cleaning house while you drank yourself into a case of Miller Lite. Sometimes I can even sleep with the closet door open.
It’s easy to laugh at my loose sleeping habits. To chuckle at the kinds of guys and girls I went for, wooed, slept with, and left behind- Easy to cackle when I remember them crying.
It’s easier to use my nightmares as a punchline. To remember the day you ripped apart my notebooks and scattered them everywhere.
To remember my rings, sliced into peices with the cutter in your garage- do you remember that? You found out they were men’s rings, remember? Thick and bulky and out of place on hands as small as mine. But they were warm, warm when my hands were numb from whatever was in my system. I wore them on my thumb, and my middle finger. I switched them, when I was able to smoke more freely.
Hands that played piano for you at little recitals, playing Beethoven and Bach. Hands that played whatever song was stuck in my head, to your neverending delight.
Stained by nicotine now. It never comes off.
My writer’s callous, on my right hand. The one you told me to get rid of... That I tried to file off in your bathroom, gritting my teeth because I refused to cry no matter how much my finger bled.
It didn’t work. You were angry that the file broke.
They told you I wasn’t well. When I was in high school. Mom was drunk, so drunk, and she called you on the phone and said “She has depression. PTSD. They think it’s from our divorce. You better help fix her.”
You told me the medicine was poison. That it would make me ugly, and bad.
You told me I wasn’t... sexy.
You told me I looked like a man.
“Kevin, she has PCOS. They said her body is producing testosterone in amounts that warp things.”
You laughed and flicked my throat, saying I looked like I had an Adam’s Apple. You put your hands on my shoulders and pushed down.
Tuck these in, sweet pea, be girly. be pretty. Be right.
I never fit in this.... body. I told you that. I never felt like a Girl. I wasn’t a girl, not really. Not in my head, not in my heart, not in anything. I wasn’t a boy either, stop calling me those words.
Men’s clothes fit me, they have more room for a body that wasn’t one or the other.
I told you so many truths. I told you so many things. I wanted to be real to you again. A person.
Maybe, if I reminded you I was here, and hurting... You’d come back.
There’s still a crying kid inside of me. They wipe their nose on their sleeve, they scream for you to come get them. To kiss those scraped knees and help them tighten those rollerblades so we can go down the hill so fast we fly.
Little me still doesn’t understand. Doesn’t know why you and Mom couldn’t just love each other. Couldn’t work things out. Why we couldn’t be a family anymore.
I watch her, from the age of twenty five chainsmoking Marlboros with scars covering me from head to toe. After ripping the hair out of my chin, of my upper lip, after washing my face and checking to make sure the lump of my throat doesn’t protrude too much. After making sure my eyebrows aren’t too thick, and humming high to make sure my voice doesn’t drop low again.
Sometimes people on the phone mistake me for you.
Sometimes, they think I’m mom’s new boyfriend they haven’t met. Even though she hasn’t dated anyone since I made jeremiah cry with my sleep rough voice and bitter words.
I’m on a hundred milligrams now. They give me trazodone to sleep- they wanted to give me tramadol, but I begged them not to give me a narcotic. Please.
I’ve been so many different people. And none of them were good enough. And you, and mom... You never told me who I was supposed to be.
Hearing my old nicknames is so jarring. Hearing my full name makes my teeth grind and hearing anyone say I Love You fills me with such cold fear that it burns my throat.
I’m in love, again. They don’t remind me of you at all.
I miss you.
Sincerely,
Pooh Bear.