Categories > Original > Drama
June 16, 2013 3:17 AM
I miss you so much sometimes, it starts to hurt.
Not the hurt where you fall and bruise your side, the kind that gets inside and bleeds like it's a living, breathing thing. That pain is intertwined with the gaping hole you left in my life; it pulsates and shifts with the fleeting contact you try to maintain. It burns when your guilt eases on my conscience, and the ache of wanting to see your face and hear you voice again is blinded with the striking red dotting my eyes, and that is fury. And my anger is not on what I’ve done – I have found the strength to cut away these weighty shackled faults that were never mine in the first place. They were yours. You are to blame for the decision which tethers us to this trivial game of push and pull, and why does it seem that it’s either one of us falls or we stand alone, apart from each other with both feet planted. Tell me where you are and where I am. Tell me where we are, what we are.
While you are already grown, I am realizing now that I am growing and maturing every day. Much of it is without you. To the point, much of it is because I am without you. If I had the guts to tell you this, I would have hoped it causes enough pain and hurt to bring you to your knees. Like this pain has brought me down time and time again.
You used to be untouchable. Did you know this? You were surrounded, immersed in this white glow. You could do no wrong. Did you know this? Is this why, when I came to you at my lowest of times, all you could say to me was I’m sorry I’m a fuck up? Maybe those words weren’t yours precisely, but when I couldn’t hear you say I’m sorry, with what my ears could perceive, then my eyes were left to do my bidding. What you meant to say was unsurprisingly lost in translation because I wanted to hear you say it, with this voice you hardly spared on me, the mouth you clinched shut when I wondered what I did wrong. “I’m sorry, baby, I didn’t mean to say any of those things to you,” and tell me exactly why you’re proud of me, not a “no matter what I’ll always be proud of you” because I never fucking felt like you were proud of me, ever. I thought I tried to make you proud, I remember choking back tears and letting phlegm wash down my throat like waves, scribbling on water stained piece of paper as you were in the bathroom getting ready to leave for work with a shaky hand “I JUST WANT TO MAKE YOU PROUD.” And maybe the trying to make you proud turned into a tendency to be someone else, someone you’d be able to call beautiful, to brag to your friends about, to be able to look at and say, “That’s my daughter.”
You don’t know that I cling to your every word. That when you voice is nitpicking at even the pettiest of flaws I will spend the next day, week, year, repeating it, like a record needle skipping on a scratch, and you will never know what scars you’ve etched into me because of that. You don’t deserve that, and if it is spite or mercy that makes you so undeserving of this, I’m not quite sure. And you will definitely never know that there is still a pathetic piece of me buried underneath this fury and pain that is waiting for you to came back. Waiting for you to erase my scars like they’re pencil marks, to apologize like I’m ready to forgive you, to be proud of me like you mean it, to love me for who I am, not who you wish I was.
While this pain and fury melds into a mess, a mess of me, there’s this hate – the kind where I’m violent and set on making you believe I’m indifferent, where the frustration builds and builds until I want to tear my hair out, lash out at the world around me. I hate you because you have all this power over me – I hate you because you make me feel like this, because you make me this way, because somehow you mean this much to me. I hate you because you still, even now, manage to play the part of a victim, once with Mom and now with me. The chip on my shoulder’s all yours, and I don’t want it back because that would mean having to be near you. But I do want it back because that would mean not needing you anymore.
I have to believe I don’t need you.
If you asked me, give it nine years, who my hero was, maybe I would have said you, Dad. When I didn’t know who you were, other than some nice title, Daddy, yes, you were my hero. I remember it like that.
An outsider, Dad, a person who came into my life but two years ago asks me if I know how lucky he feels to be in my life, if I know how beautiful I am, if I know how proud he is of me, every day, and I don’t know how to tell him I don’t believe him. Because somewhere inside of me I’m thinking it’s because I don’t know if you even consider that about me, if that even crosses your mind once and that makes me feel pathetic. I cling to this worn image of you, the hero you my five year old self knew. And let me say now, that if you were ever felt scared or threatened you were being replaced, at least know you weren’t. You aren’t. This man is not my dad. You are. That will never change.
And suddenly I’m angry.
I am fucking furious because no matter how far away you are, how long it’s been since I’ve last seen you, I can’t deny that you are my dad, you’ve always been my dad, and you always will be. I can’t run away from that, as far and as fast as I dare to go.
When you tell me to not forget me, I roll my eyes because how could I forget you? You’re with me every day. You are a black hole in the back of my mind, swallowing me whole, in pennies tossed in a well that has no bottom, in holding my breath in a tunnel that has no end. The words that have died on my lips, each sound, down to the meaningless whimpers and the broken syllables of all the things I’ve wanted to say to you. My feelings are a contradiction, the inconsistency of how I wish you were here and how I wish I never had to think about you ever again. And even above all my hate is a ceaseless love and the ever-present nauseating chant of I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.
So here’s to missing you. I can’t tell if that hurts as much as being around you does.
----
i'm not sure what i'm doing posting this, but i'm thinking letting go of this might help. "thanks":https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slI33iE7cT8&feature=kp for reading.
-az
I miss you so much sometimes, it starts to hurt.
Not the hurt where you fall and bruise your side, the kind that gets inside and bleeds like it's a living, breathing thing. That pain is intertwined with the gaping hole you left in my life; it pulsates and shifts with the fleeting contact you try to maintain. It burns when your guilt eases on my conscience, and the ache of wanting to see your face and hear you voice again is blinded with the striking red dotting my eyes, and that is fury. And my anger is not on what I’ve done – I have found the strength to cut away these weighty shackled faults that were never mine in the first place. They were yours. You are to blame for the decision which tethers us to this trivial game of push and pull, and why does it seem that it’s either one of us falls or we stand alone, apart from each other with both feet planted. Tell me where you are and where I am. Tell me where we are, what we are.
While you are already grown, I am realizing now that I am growing and maturing every day. Much of it is without you. To the point, much of it is because I am without you. If I had the guts to tell you this, I would have hoped it causes enough pain and hurt to bring you to your knees. Like this pain has brought me down time and time again.
You used to be untouchable. Did you know this? You were surrounded, immersed in this white glow. You could do no wrong. Did you know this? Is this why, when I came to you at my lowest of times, all you could say to me was I’m sorry I’m a fuck up? Maybe those words weren’t yours precisely, but when I couldn’t hear you say I’m sorry, with what my ears could perceive, then my eyes were left to do my bidding. What you meant to say was unsurprisingly lost in translation because I wanted to hear you say it, with this voice you hardly spared on me, the mouth you clinched shut when I wondered what I did wrong. “I’m sorry, baby, I didn’t mean to say any of those things to you,” and tell me exactly why you’re proud of me, not a “no matter what I’ll always be proud of you” because I never fucking felt like you were proud of me, ever. I thought I tried to make you proud, I remember choking back tears and letting phlegm wash down my throat like waves, scribbling on water stained piece of paper as you were in the bathroom getting ready to leave for work with a shaky hand “I JUST WANT TO MAKE YOU PROUD.” And maybe the trying to make you proud turned into a tendency to be someone else, someone you’d be able to call beautiful, to brag to your friends about, to be able to look at and say, “That’s my daughter.”
You don’t know that I cling to your every word. That when you voice is nitpicking at even the pettiest of flaws I will spend the next day, week, year, repeating it, like a record needle skipping on a scratch, and you will never know what scars you’ve etched into me because of that. You don’t deserve that, and if it is spite or mercy that makes you so undeserving of this, I’m not quite sure. And you will definitely never know that there is still a pathetic piece of me buried underneath this fury and pain that is waiting for you to came back. Waiting for you to erase my scars like they’re pencil marks, to apologize like I’m ready to forgive you, to be proud of me like you mean it, to love me for who I am, not who you wish I was.
While this pain and fury melds into a mess, a mess of me, there’s this hate – the kind where I’m violent and set on making you believe I’m indifferent, where the frustration builds and builds until I want to tear my hair out, lash out at the world around me. I hate you because you have all this power over me – I hate you because you make me feel like this, because you make me this way, because somehow you mean this much to me. I hate you because you still, even now, manage to play the part of a victim, once with Mom and now with me. The chip on my shoulder’s all yours, and I don’t want it back because that would mean having to be near you. But I do want it back because that would mean not needing you anymore.
I have to believe I don’t need you.
If you asked me, give it nine years, who my hero was, maybe I would have said you, Dad. When I didn’t know who you were, other than some nice title, Daddy, yes, you were my hero. I remember it like that.
An outsider, Dad, a person who came into my life but two years ago asks me if I know how lucky he feels to be in my life, if I know how beautiful I am, if I know how proud he is of me, every day, and I don’t know how to tell him I don’t believe him. Because somewhere inside of me I’m thinking it’s because I don’t know if you even consider that about me, if that even crosses your mind once and that makes me feel pathetic. I cling to this worn image of you, the hero you my five year old self knew. And let me say now, that if you were ever felt scared or threatened you were being replaced, at least know you weren’t. You aren’t. This man is not my dad. You are. That will never change.
And suddenly I’m angry.
I am fucking furious because no matter how far away you are, how long it’s been since I’ve last seen you, I can’t deny that you are my dad, you’ve always been my dad, and you always will be. I can’t run away from that, as far and as fast as I dare to go.
When you tell me to not forget me, I roll my eyes because how could I forget you? You’re with me every day. You are a black hole in the back of my mind, swallowing me whole, in pennies tossed in a well that has no bottom, in holding my breath in a tunnel that has no end. The words that have died on my lips, each sound, down to the meaningless whimpers and the broken syllables of all the things I’ve wanted to say to you. My feelings are a contradiction, the inconsistency of how I wish you were here and how I wish I never had to think about you ever again. And even above all my hate is a ceaseless love and the ever-present nauseating chant of I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.
So here’s to missing you. I can’t tell if that hurts as much as being around you does.
----
i'm not sure what i'm doing posting this, but i'm thinking letting go of this might help. "thanks":https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slI33iE7cT8&feature=kp for reading.
-az
Sign up to rate and review this story