Some nights I put on my father’s chalk outline and teach it how to walk

What is a father, if not the first place you learn to run from? I grew up as a girl who rotated sleeping with her stuffed animals because she didn’t want one of them to not feel loved, who overwatered plants because she didn’t know when to stop giving. I don’t know what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely. My dad sends me old pictures of myself when I was young and wore a size 6 in kids. He tells me how cute I was, how he misses it. He was so nice to her he treats older me differently now. I still am scared of the dark and cry in my moms arms. Even at 16, I still sleep with the same blanket that I did in those photographs. and while I pretend to be tough just like how he taught me, I’m still a child. And with that, I am my mother’s child. Hushed conversations around open ears. Sorrowful sobs watched by young eyes. Poisonous words cracking the heart of a child.

I no longer hear my father the same.

I no longer see my father the same.

I no longer love my father the same.

I hear my father with the same ears my mother does.

I see my father with the same eyes my mother does.

I love my father with the same heart my mother does

I still remember myself as a little girl

You’ve got to bite the hand that starves you, and in doing so praise the place that birthed you. Birthed you f***** up. Birthed you ugly, and unwanted, and ready to scream. He believed he loved me, but I could tell him how untrue that was. I could list for him the number of times he had placed me within the jaws of death; I could list for him the number of times he had failed to be a father to me. Why must growing up have to mean growing out of our fathers love? When I see families together at a park or laughing at a restaurant, part of my heart breaks for what I used to have. You’ll hear “daddy issues” being thrown around and laugh it off when someone asks if your dad is dead or just not in your life, but when you sit in that emotion there is no escaping it. Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely. “ You will forgive him, you will see him again” but what if the dagger he carelessly tossed into my back won’t come out?