Dear father,
what can I say, but thanks for the sperm? Thanks for the genes and dna. Thanks for the spark of life that I am. Thanks for somehow allowing yourself to have a moment with my mum.
Though that's where the thanks stop.
I don't know what happened and it doesn't matter anyway. All I know is that you hurt her, so she hurt you and so a big ball of hurt got booted around a bit.
You know she never stopped hurting. She's been kicked around hurting ever since.
She's still hurting and still healing and still finding her feet. Maybe it wasn't started by you, ya know. Maybe it started with her mum and how she died. With her dad and how he 'visited' other women while her mum was dying. Maybe it was a bunch of little things like that.
Little things that she never learned what to do with them. Never knew how to handle them, so your one more little thing was just too much.
She say's she picked you, to be my dad. So she could be a mum and have someone to love. Someone to love her. Because no one loved her, or she didn't let them.
Maybe you wonder about me in the back of your head. Maybe you think about how you wanted to be there for me. Well, it was kinda all shit but not as shitty as some, so I think I was lucky. Because I get to make you up and make you into something that is superficial and unreasonably wonderful. You pat me on the head like my pa used to and you tell me “babe, it's all gunna be alright”
And your not human, your just a ghost. Your just someone that visits every now and then and I cry and I pretend to hate men and you laugh at me and say that men are idiots and fools and that there are some that grow up and are decent. And that there is someone for me.
And I nod my head and say thanks dad. And you fade away.
I cling to stories about fathers, even the shitty fathers, because at least they where real. And I deny my step father because that makes it easier. It's easy to hate him and deny him and blame him and turn him into the evil one. Now that he is dead, I miss his realness. Even though we didn't talk for over 15 years after that big fight and I left and I never came back.
He was real, at least. Ya know, even in his shitty way. He was real.
I went and saw him. They had a viewing before the funeral and I went to the funeral because funerals are for the living. My sister gave me permission. I know I would not have gone if she didn't do that, and she did. So I went.
The last thing I said to him was I hope you die happy. I had practised the scene of it in my head because I knew the fight was coming and I wanted to say something that was at least nice. So I wanted to see if he did. And of course he didn't die happy, how could he?
He was a paraplegic both crippled in body and mind with his relentless unforgiving bitterness. How could he know happiness? Mum calls it a death mask. You see most people when they die their face relaxes and they look peaceful. I wouldn't know because he was the first and only dead person I ever saw (so far anyway) But some people hold a face of bitterness of hate and of a hardness that makes them look like their eyes will open any second.
I went because I wanted to connect to him with compassion, I wanted to humanise him. I wanted to simply allow that little girl in me to cry and to remember that for a while he was my dad. And that for a while that little girl felt protected by him and love by him.
To focus on the positive stuff for once. To even get down on my hands and knees and search them out. Because it was hard to recall them. There was so much shit to throw out. It was so hard to find her and to connect her back to some good memories.
But what would you care or know about that? Did you have kids then? Go off and father someone you could touch and hold and make it up to? Or did you decide it was a single life for ever? Never let anyone tie you down? Did you go all weird and change your sex? It makes me kinda giggle to think about these things.
I don't have much respect for authority. Or I mean to say I don't automatically give respect out like normal people do. It kinda gets me into trouble. Especially at work. Because I pretty much think everyone is equal straight up. Regardless what they get paid. Maybe it means I look at people in ways they don't like to be looked at? What ever… I have learned to deal with it.
I lived in fantasies and escaped the real world at any opportunity. Though I knew how to look after others even if I didn't know how to look after myself. I think I got that from my mum.
I don't think I want to know you. It's a thing that sits in the back of my head. What would knowing you prove to me? What would it serve me? I don't know if I have the heart to love you. Or to even cope with the humaness of you. Or the realness of you.
It's kinda easier this way. While ever your a ghost I am in charge… ya know? I don't have to respect you, or listen to you.