i carry a father
You bore me into your absence.
At 52, I see you as clearly as one might. The oldest son of an abusive, alcoholic father. You carry his name, and his father’s before him. You held the hands of younger brothers as you walked down the hall to visit your mother who was recovering from yet another still birth. You built a moat and castled all of this.
Eventually you married the child of another abusive, alcoholic man, and the two of you howled your wounds to the moon while unknowing girls slept in their beds. We woke and stumbled down the hall, drawn by your mesmerizing duet of fear.
And then one day you took your body and you were gone. I looked around for you, for a long time. It’s hard to find someone that’s never been. I pieced together the bits of story available to me, like pictures in an album, until I realized I needed to put fingers to keys and write my own.
On this Father’s Day I hold the recent words of a friend who crossed an ocean yet again, envious of those who do not have to make her journey to and from love. I think of you - father, dad - somewhere on this same continent as me. I picture your heart, held safe with the drawbridge up. I see I’ve inadvertently clenched my fingers shut, again.
Much like my mother’s taking, your absence is something that has taught me to carry my life like a full tray of food, ordered by a huge family celebrating at a long table. I’m walking on cobblestones - like the ones you and mom did, when you ran away with me to the land of your birth - but I’m not tripping as I’ve taught myself to look a few steps ahead. To stop and adjust my hold on the tray. To put the whole thing down and curl up my hand, heave forward, and wail into my own castle of the absence and the taking. Of mothers and fathers on the other end of phone lines. Dead parents held longingly as sweet, rich memories.
This is not you.
Sometimes I get lost in the fold for awhile. I look out and see my fingernails embedded in my palm. Observe the marks they leave as I slowly stretch all five digits and move them in an engrained floreo, a circling. Both hands to knees in the arch of the return salutation to the sun.
I stand. Flatten my palm. Put you and mom at its centre. Pick up the tray and deliver the food to the joyous family, slowly emptying, laughter encircling me.
I carry your absence on my open palm. I weep for what I do not know of you, who you have not been. I lick my finger and fix the hair of the little boy who is about to take the hands of two others, kiss his his forehead softly for the journey. I wonder what it would have been like, to learn to rely upon myself by first relying upon another. But this is not my truth.
So I balance you and mom there, just so, close to a line that might hold a magical tale about my future. If I was a palm reader. Instead I balance the wounds of my truthful life. I bear your absence.
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