God, My Father.

There is little distinction between God and my father. I know both to be real and true because I have been touched by them, but it has been so long that I am left to wonder if I invented them. My father left me when I was twelve; my God left me when I was fifteen. I am twenty-one years old and still, I sit in the rubble of these relationships and worship. 

I kneel and ask for a sign, any sign that I have not been forgotten. Sometimes they come and I believe God is real. But he only exists to mock me. My father need not exist to mock me. My dreams of him are mocked to death by time. It’s been nearly ten years since I have heard a word from him and still, I look in mirrors and practice what I will say to him when I see him again. “I somehow adore and hate you for leaving this hole in me. It has been filled with incredible beauty and horrific ugliness”, I’ll say. The seconds passing on the clock start to sound like laughter.  

As my father’s daughter, I resent him. I resent that I experienced disappointment so acutely and so early in my life. I resent that I have such vivid memories of waiting in the windowsill, using only my fingers and my breath to draw and pass the time. I resent that my mother was also left with a hole and no knowledge of how to fill it. 

As a woman who understands sociology, I understand and empathize with my father. There was no hope for him. Before he was even born, he was destined to spend his life running. It is hard to accept that I am just another thing he has run from but he knows a life of nothing else. 

It is hard to say if my empathy or my resentment towards my father is larger. However, it is the resentment that I cling to. I keep my father alive with my anger. If I have no father to be mad at, I have no father at all. So I stay mad.

I pray to a God I don’t believe in because it’s better to pray and doubt than to not pray at all. So I stay doubtful but never quite cynical. 

 I wear my neuroses like a badge of honor. “Someone was here! Someone loved me once! They couldn’t stay but they loved me!”, it says. And there lies the beauty. Gone is my father, gone is my god, but the love remains. It may be covered in dust and grief now, but it is love all the same. 

I have nothing to show for it but these tears, but believe me, I was loved.