Dear Dad

Dear Dad I'm dedicating my first April letter to you I have twenty years to tell you I hope my words find you at your best Unprepared and ready to blame yourself for the emotional waste you took with you upon your leaving Sorry, I haven't introduced myself Here is the six-year-old girl and the twenty-year-old woman Please make yourself comfortable I have been folding my tongue underneath itself for way too long And if there's something I did not inherit from you, was cowardly In twenty Januarys without you, I learned to ride a bike I bought my first lipstick I fell in love for the first time And got my heart broken for the second (time) You, of course, marked the first one I have repeated you in my soul over and over for twenty years I offered my heart a vague image of what I wished to create of you Abstractly dreaming of your presence to avoid the anger that your absence left in my life I went to college and fell in love with men with the same emotional pattern of abandoning me in the middle of loving You set a poor standard of what to expect when receiving And I desperately sought your absence in my youth Making mistakes Avoiding the affection of those whose intentions cared enough to love me right But begging for withered fondness to everything with a slight resemblance to you Despite all my heartbreaks, you marked the one that hurt me the most And like a coward, I cuddled my feelings in poems I dedicated thousands of them to you Trying to resuscitate your presence in my life, and inconsolably failing my soul in every attempt A refugee in the arms of a foreign reality that hurts too much to face it And so, I hid it in the wagon of melancholy for as long as I could And I made everything out of nothing In sheer desperation I looked for you on the last page of my books In old lovers And absent letters Trying to find a home just for you to shut the door on me By the time I grew up and became a woman, my soul was already too broken to forgive you I have wandered for years, thirsty to know about your abstract persona And you only offered me deserts of emotional falsehood Low absences And always latent to the concept that you were never willing to love me That's why I hated myself for so long because I assumed that maybe, in an alternate reality, something in me hurt you enough to leave and not come back To choose me as your responsibility and then play the irresponsible I admire your evil skills of half-loving me and lying with grudges Like a marathon, you ran away from my need to feel loved No matter how broken you have been in the past Trying to heal your wounds, I bled my heart out And I hated you for making me feel guilty for loving you I hated you for being the protagonist of my love stories and the villain at the same time I hated you for uselessly inviting me to run the race and letting go of my hand past the first fifty meters— hoping that I could successfully complete the rest alone But, in a fair attempt with myself, I have been waiting for you With a broken soul and an open heart–ready to forgive I have stopped dreaming of you in the spring and mourning you in the winter I've saved my tears for your last goodbye Sitting behind the slamming door that separated our lives And unnecessarily calming fears of failing once more I have been crying out to the version of yourself that you never dared to face The reflection of your actions in the only person capable of blaming you for the permanent damage for which perhaps, in another hundred years, might be forgiven Your daughter writes to you; the one with the heart turned to ashes Incapable of loving again