Whenever I think about my dad, there’s always one specific memory that sticks out. Before you can really understand it, there has to be some background explanation. I don’t have much of a relationship with my dad, mostly due to his lack of showing up. I was about 6 years old, in first grade when he took his first business trip, and being 6 I probably cried a lot. It must’ve been a few days long; the first trip was probably the shortest. He used to drive me to school every day. Once, he drove my sister and I through a blizzard on Route 1 and the traffic was so bad that we got out of the car and went to Burger King for breakfast. I used to really like their French toast. I was so excited, and I got to miss some school. I was 5 then, 11 years later and that’s the only memory of him involved with my daily life. After that, it’s spotty. Throughout those years, my mom did double the parenting for me and my sister, Ariana. When I was in the 6th grade I went through one of those cliché rebellious phases, and my mom was so fed up that she wanted to send me to live in New York with my dad. I was still pretty young, so seeing my dad seemed like a treat, and living with him seemed even better. It turned out that he was too busy for me.
Fast forwarding to two summers ago a few days after I turned 15, my parents and I dropped Ariana off for her first day of college at Smith in Northampton, Massachusetts. Ariana and I had just started getting along that year, and she loved me more than I think either of my parents do. I had never lived without her and I remember not looking forward to it. Once we left her there, we drove home and stopped at Not Your Average Joe’s for dinner. Just the three of us felt eerie and it seemed like she was just in the bathroom and we were waiting for her to come back. The entire dinner my dad was on a business call and my mom was trying to stay busy and I was just watching them both. I had a resonating feeling of discomfort that entire day. We ate, and I was silent, and we drove home. It was a lovely night outside and the sky was bright orange and it was warm but had hints of cold. My dad still tried to be a parent but it never felt right, a whole chunk of my life was missing. We went back home and my house was dark and quiet. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my parents when it started. My mom and I joke around a lot and sometimes I make fun of her but she knows that I’m kidding. My dad doesn’t understand that since he doesn’t really live with us. I must’ve said something in passing that he thought was offensive. I had been pretty silent because everything felt different without my sister. Since I’m unable to articulate most things he didn’t know that; he seemed to be bitter about my silence. He had this slow build-up of anger towards me that evening that I didn’t understand. Then he started saying things that out of context would seem like jokes, but he said them with a harshness in his voice and in his eyes that left me feeling sick and I kept turning to leave but he wouldn’t let me. That night was like a storm brewing inside my house made up of dysfunction. My mom tried to diffuse it but she couldn’t so I got away to my room as soon as I saw the chance. A teenage girl’s room is safety, when you’re young hiding under the sheets seems like it can protect you from anything. I thought that was the end of it. A few minutes later they called me back downstairs into this unnecessarily fancy room in my house that no one goes into. It was getting dark and I had that nervous feeling when your heart beats like it’s going to dissolve inside of your chest. My dad started talking and the talking turned to yelling and I couldn’t say a word, all I could do was look at him and cry. It was so strange because there’s nothing that can make me cry. He kept telling me how horrible I was, and the only thing I remember clearly was him saying, “I’m not like your mother. I don’t love you unconditionally, I can go cold. You can make it happen easily.” And that’s when I left. I walked out of the house without any shoes on and sat in the woods outside of my house for two hours and just wrote about it. I sat in a pile of leaves in the dark and got mosquito bites all over me. Eventually I went inside once my mum started calling my phone over and over. She asked me to talk to him and as much as I didn’t want to, I did it mostly for her. He said he was sorry but I didn’t believe it. There is no resolution. Since then, whenever he comes home, I leave. His trips last months now and sometimes he video chats my mum and asks to see me, but I can’t bring myself to say anything.
I once wrote the previous words about the most important 10 minutes of my life, I chose the time when my father told me he didn’t love me. I got an A, my English teacher told me he was proud of me. What I didn’t get to write:

your name makes me heart feel like acid rain







once you told me you’d hit me so hard that people would whisper


every time i think about it i crumble into pieces smaller than your heart
when you convinced me i was worthless









i hid in lightless woods for hours











i wanted to forget















now when you lean to touch me i wince









faking functionality in public twists my insides







your name kills the light behind my eyes
It is the strangest thing, to love and hate someone so important to the sanctity of your life. When you love someone and all they do is hurt you, not physically or even on purpose, you wither. Everything turns into a façade, a necessity for distraction. I am not weak. I am the reason for my strength, something all young girls should be taught. The people who love you are supposed to want good for you, your parents are supposed to be altruistic. The whole world needs to look at what parents are teaching their kids, the way their actions can make or break another life, no matter how small. I loved him you see, and that was the worst part. He was extremes. Extreme light and extreme dark. He could crack me with one look, I’d be a mess for days. What killed me, was that I grew up resenting someone who I was supposed to love unconditionally, who was supposed to love me unconditionally. I dreaded his presence but never realized the full effect of his absence. And I’ve been so angry, I grew up mad at the world. Mad at myself for the bulletproof walls built around my heart, do they protect you if you don’t even know how to crack them open? Fragility needs protection .Someone once called me a burning forest that wouldn’t go down. My heart’s been described as deep waters as cold as the arctic. Sometimes it feels like I live alone in the bottom of the ocean, where no one can get to, nor would they like to. And all it takes for you is a nosedive into the waters, maybe even a cannonball, to break through and cause my heart to wrench I have so much love and I am the reason I can’t show it. I feel my insides physically turn to stone. Everything in me is an anchor.