When I was a child, I used to think my heart was a circle. The circle is the most diverse shape in nature, from the footsteps of men untouched by God on the moon, to the way that animals eat each other to stay alive. It all joins in one large sphere, the ends tying together in a circular knot. Emotions are a circle, repetitive, joint. My anger is the fifth circle, the mud caked onto the memories of cold winters, drowned in the pits of the river Styx.  My joy is the whirlpool attacking the sink’s drain. I used to believe everything was metaphorically a circle, but I’m starting to think that human nature is the exception.

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My father lived in the bad side of Albuquerque as my mother would say. He would drive up into the polished community we lived in with our mother although it was obvious that we were much too poor to be living there. We’d throw our weekend bags into the backseat of his beat-up used Ford and buckle ourselves up in anticipation of the moment we’d reverse the action to get snacks from the inside of a gas station down the street for the two-hour drive. We’d eventually pick up a Hot-N-Ready pizza, get to the one-bedroom house he lived in, watch a movie a child certainly shouldn’t be consuming, and go to bed. This was my circle. One we would repeat every other Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The circle’s end point was my dad yelling El Chupacabra every time her car would pull up in the driveway.

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I haven’t seen my father since I was 11. I’ve had to get comfortable telling doctors and peers alike that he was abusive, and I’ve practiced how to turn it into a joke while looking at myself in the mirror. After a long court hearing, he lost custody and decided the next best option was to leave without a word. I like to think it made me funnier, although my therapist would argue that I need to give myself more credit and not let my dad claim the things I created for myself. I find this contradictory because I am 50% of him. No matter how pale I get, how short I cut my hair, or how quickly my skin heals, that 50% will always remain under the surface. It makes me sick to think about my blood, not because I am afraid of such, but because I have this dream where I can drain it all and be completely clean of him. I imagine it spilling out of me- it’s peaceful- like a waterfall of clarity. I can imagine it slowly trickling down into the drain like water onto dry lips and I feel this sensation of being more and more clean as it trickles out.

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I got sent to the looney bin as I lovingly refer to it after I had to get stitches from cutting myself. It was a lot less dramatic than it sounds; it was essentially a days’ worth of learning coping skills I was already very much aware of - just choosing not to use - followed by a bagel with strawberry cream cheese, a milkshake, and as many episodes of Breaking Bad I could watch until I fell asleep. When driving me to the hospital, my mother made it clear this was my father’s fault for giving me his “bad genetics.” I wasn’t allowed to feel anything without it looping back to him, especially something my mother saw as wrong. This was no longer a circle, but a blackhole of the reminder of who I was.

I heard about a lot of sh*tty parents in that time in my life[1], and it taught me through a series of support groups, DBT sessions, and poorly done art therapy lessons[2], it is that when a

[1] This kid named Nick’s parents took him to an exorcist before a therapist.

[2] We once had to draw a complex emotion, to which my ward best friend, Braxton, drew one of the most hated therapists, Chad, as a Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure character. He called the emotion “Chadness” and in the box that was to explain how it made you feel he wrote “baldness,” a reference to the lack of hair on dear ole’ Chad’s head, and “violating HIPPA”, something Chad did a lot.

child doesn’t have a parent for whatever reason, there’s an odd silence. It’s cold and empty, and something I can only summarize to the likings of the loneliness of a residential street at the very start of the morning, or the cool touch of an unfilled bathtub on bare skin. There’s this longing for something your body knows, but it’s not there.

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I made my first real friend when I was in middle school. We didn’t have much in common, and looking back on it, I wonder if we only loved each other as much as we did because we both were as miserable as the other. He lost his father in the sixth grade and would go on to lose his mother our freshman year. He was consistently zoning out, something I lovingly would joke was “the call of God”. I accepted this was most likely his unhealthy coping mechanism from the guilt and shame I would learn he felt everyday for not trying to help his father more. I also learned to accept that grief is a funny thing. Something that is generally unexplainable at best, but I do deeply believe is the only time you can see someone’s soul. The pieces of us that fall apart, and we must collect with shaky hands. I wonder what the grief of losing a parent feels like now that I have seen it, the staticky expression that painted his face. I wonder if I understand this grief, or if I’m supposed to only feel resentment because all I see when I look in the mirror is the face of a man whom I can still contact but am too afraid to.

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The life inside of me is no longer a circle, but rather a vortex. Every day I wake up, brush my teeth, eat dinner, and go to bed. This is repeated without fail no matter the intentions set, but I’ve noticed I’ve began to suck in the things around me until I can feel whole. I realized this when my I looked at an old photograph of my father. I had become him, something, someone I no longer recognized.

One of the last weekends I saw my father was the climax of our negative relationship. It was after two hours’ worth of screaming and occasional thud between my father and sister, something she still refuses to tell me the details about, that I was finally allowed to leave the room my stepmother locked me in for a glass of water. As I left the room to get to the kitchen, I found my father sitting on a newly purchased couch, something to replace the one from my youth. He looked out of place against the modern fabric and style of the couch, his face tear stained and angry. I always likened my father to the smell of beer and red shirts from the thrift store, this seemed to clash with the image of him after marrying my stepmother, but especially with the red melting his tan skin in that moment.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, sitting on the couch farthest away from him, clutching the hemming on my nightgown; the reminder I was still a child.

“Allie, do you know where you come from? You come from a line of people like me, people like us; people who ruin things. Allie, you do not ruin things. You are the only person I met who does not ruin things. We have a plot of land on the reservation. Land a line of people ruined, but you…you will not ruin this. You will bring love and happiness to this land. If I die tonight, I want you to get this land, you hear me? I am a bad father, but you… you are happiness on earth.”