Everything I know about my dad:
SPOILERS! (Click to view)My dad was a tugboat operator. He was gone for six months at a time, out to sea, then was off for six months. He had a mustache and wore plaid button-downs and jeans. He drank heavily, resulting either in him passed out in a chair in the middle of the day, or beating my mom. Twice, he passed out while babysitting me as a toddler. One of those times, my mom found me on the balcony, and the other, I had closed myself in a bedroom and fallen asleep on the floor. Another time, he left and didn't come home, and was found later in a hotel room after a suicide attempt. He was committed to a hospital, and hated my mom even more for that. He threatened her constantly. His brother succeeded in killing himself around the same time. My mom left, and we moved out of state together, and the threats continued. He never paid child support, despite being fairly wealthy. He told her he didn't want her to benefit in any single way, and if he had to take it from me in order to guarantee that, he would. And he did. He would write to me occasionally on sheets of yellow paper from legal pads, and tell me the name of each ship he was on. I had a music box he gave me when I was a baby, and I stored his letters in it, as well as a gold bracelet inscribed with my name on the front and some sentimental line on the back. I had no pictures until years later. He bought me a Game Gear in fifth grade, because it made him better than my mom, who couldn't afford it. I played it constantly and loved it more because he was tied to it. When I was nineteen, he sent me a birthday card and a letter, which I lost and remember nothing of, except that it started our correspondence. I met him for the first time since I was two, months after that, at nineteen. He flew out for one afternoon. I sat in the back yard on lawn chairs and we faced each other, in what felt like a terrible interview. I told him all of my most personal secrets and facts, attempting to fast-track some kind of bonding or understanding. Maybe to prove to him that I was an adult. He took us out to eat at the most expensive restaurant, got something he couldn't finish, and didn't take a box. My mom asked for a box so she could take it home, underlining the difference in them. Or in us. She couldn't afford these restaurants and refused to waste an ounce of the experience. He was happy to throw away half of his meal. It was nothing special to him. For some reason, this was one of the most telling and awkward moments, for me. What must he have thought of us? Our home, cheap and old and falling apart. A mess. My mom, showing all of the years that had passed. Wearing what she probably thought was her nicest sweater, not knowing what to do with her thinning and over-processed hair, .. I was still wearing all or mostly black, cut-off socks on my arms, inches of bracelets. My eyeliner was out of control, my hair was waist-long and untrimmed and dark. I was probably wearing either spikes or chains around my neck. Needless to say, my dad didn't even take a picture with me before he left, and he left right after dinner. Hopped a flight back to the west coast. A year or two later, I emailed him and asked him to borrow money when I was in a pinch. A couple hundred dollars. He wrote a scathing, insulting, swear-filled reply and that's the last I've heard from him, and the last I will hear.
I can't even fake emotion for that subject.
And, obligatory holiday post:
SPOILERS! (Click to view)Holidays.
Again.
They come around fast as fuck. Wasn't I just here?
No. Last Thanksgiving, I was in Connecticut, freshly broken up. I was at his family's, and it was sad. For us. Or for me. We walked on eggshells for a month with one another. Every night was a question of who would sleep on the couch, and who got the bed. He bought me a Christmas tree to put up, since I didn't have one, and I strung it up with lights and slept by it. We tried sleeping in the same bed a couple times, but it was too damned sad. And every time he put his arm around me, my head and heart raced with questions of whether or not things might go back. Change. We talked about it, on Thanksgiving. Then instead of making a Thanksgiving dinner at home, he picked up pre-made dinners from .. Whatever that stupid place was. Boston Market. We sat together quietly and ate in the living room. And later, frustrated, in a yelling match over the fact that he was leaving me to go eat Thanksgiving with another girl and her family, I insulted this attempt â said that it wasn't a real Thanksgiving, it was cheap, it was pathetic, etc. And he cried. He actually cried, right there in front of me, before twisting it into anger. Everything was so fragile. I spent an hour apologizing, .. but really, I felt empty and scammed. I didn't have any kind of holidays, there. We could have, but he wouldn't put forth the effort, and I was just as hurt. I left before Christmas â while he was at a holiday party at work, getting drunk an hour or two away, unable to drive home, .. I was putting all of my boxes in my trunk. I was deciding which things to leave, if they didn't fit. I was tearing myself away, because I knew he couldn't stop me. I was exhausted and cried all night, until I fell asleep for a couple hours. He did drive home, and in the morning we sat together on the couch, my car packed a few feet outside the door, and both sobbed. Even that morning, car packed, I didn't believe I was really leaving. I thought something would change and he'd beg me to stay and try again. I was in Ohio eleven hours later.
One about nothing:
SPOILERS! (Click to view)Watching Winnie the Pooh with half my attention across a dull tube television, glass covered in fuzzy dust and a heavy afternoon glare, obstructing the pastel colors, making the half cartoon, half âstillâ episode even more of a yawn. If that was possible. I sat on the floor, on brown shag carpet against a brown couch, and watched as the characters walked in the rain, through vegetable fields, with muddy fur and hurt feelings. An odd, dull show. It gave me a headache. People wear neon tee-shirts with these characters now: Piglet with flowers on his head, Eeyore with the sun shining down ironically. But whenever I am reminded of the actual show, the narrator, the way it started with the page of a book, and Owl, with [his/her] gender confusion, I get the headache. I see the dust on the bulging glass and am reminded of a never ending 1 o'clock hour somewhere in my childhood, home sick from school, forever disenchanted.
Another about nothing:
SPOILERS! (Click to view)Increasingly over the years, I have become .. particular and unyielding when it comes to things like how near I let people to me, how far I let them wander once I let them near, how much effort I put into keeping them near and how long I'll sustain the effort, the effect the effort has on my want or need of them .. How many people I can handle at these distances or closeness levels, etc.
I can understand why I am attracted to the less attainable. I can understand why I need the chase, why I need to earn attention and affection. Who wants something they haven't earned? How can you really feel strongly about it? It'll never feel as good as something you've had to strive for. And it's not that it usually pays off in the end â in fact it almost never does, and I spend the majority of the time severely uncomfortable, conscious of it, and plotting my escape. And then I do escape, but not in search of the opposite. Not in search of something easy, served up on a dish, ..
Just something maybe better suited for my needs.
Permanence:
SPOILERS! (Click to view)The only things that bother me on a really core level are the things I began with, which are no more and can never be restored. Once flesh, now ghosts. Once pillars, now dust. The family I was born into .. not having the same face I, as a child, grew to know and assume it always would. The pets I relied on as my best friends and wordless confidants, gone and without replacement. Experiences necessarily quarantined to my younger years. I can't mourn all of these things enough .. I think I feel cheated and betrayed by their leaving in any permanent way. This is something I have always been in denial of -- that there can even be permanence. That it is possible .. that something can, by its nature alone, never be challenged or undone. I have theories on why this is so hard for me to accept. First of all, it's human nature. We are in denial of time, of the irreversibility, the rigidity of it. We're always finding ways to fight it, to stave it off, always searching for the "key to eternal youth." Illusions. We must not end. No one living to tell of it has experienced their end, so it isn't fair that they must meet it. They must be allowed to fight for a chance, as with everything else. Second contributing factor has come around with video games and the desensitization toward death, since you'll just regenerate anyway. No permanence. Consequences aren't final -- they're on par with any other consequences.
There.
I wrote.
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