This is about an experience with my father this past summer. |
For Papa In June, after several beers Papa asks me to stay, easing himself to the ground placing an empty beer can to his side he looks at me the way you do when you are preparing to scold a child And for the first time I see myself in his eyes Two days ago my father told me he loved me for the first time in several years it was drowned out by the static of running water in the kitchen sink and sadly, I gave no response, but instead turned back to the dirty dishes His mother, my grandmother was dying in the other room We stood back to back amidst the stale air as our lives became forever stained with cancer I felt the permanent lines forming on his face, wishing I could take my palms and rub the sadness out but instead I stood too afraid to look into his eyes and become the adult of the situation, promising him that it would get better, though it will never make sense, the best is almost always the unexplainable It has been fourteen years since I needed my father and pined for the reassurance of his touch or the attention that would remind me he was there And now I am five years old again with curly blonde hair, but his touch is no longer familar and his voice no longer soothing Time has succeeded, leaving us nostalgic for 1990 Sometimes I think about being forty-five and burying my father I wonder if it will hurt more that he is gone or that I never really knew him Then I wonder if I will think of that June when the world split sideways and never came back again, though he was desperate in his love for me, I refused to stay me And am forced to let regret define me |