In the photo I’m wearing an orange snowsuit with a fur-lined
hood. I’m standing in the middle of the snow, with my nose bright red from the
nip of the cold. Smiling.
In the next picture my dad, sister and I are tobaggoning
down the hill, on one of those wooden sleds like you see in old movies. He’s happy. I’m happy. My sister’s happy.
Mom must be the person who is taking the picture. This was her way, I can only
imagine, of making everything feel good for the family. A chance to have dad at
home with us kids instead of “working late” or going out for days saying he was
at some mysterious coffee shop. On this day though, it all seemed so much fun.
A normal family. One where we had a Dad who stayed home because he loved being
with us. Because he had nowhere else he’d rather be. Because we all looked so
good together.
This is the photo that I think of whenever I see you,
Dad. That part that holds you up as
someone who knows how to play, laugh, make everything feel good for mom. She
really wanted you at home, Dad. We all did.
I remember this image whenever we meet or speak on the phone. It’s there
whenever I look at your eyes that have been vacant or driven by your other
choices. Choices to stay at a distance. Choices to enjoy a different kind of
happiness. A choice to gamble the money away. A choice to forget the tobaggon
rides when you decided to be with other women.
I look at this photo in my mind and see a man who could have
had so much more. But perhaps this is the vacancy in my own heart. Not yours.
For you probably haven’t noticed that there’s something missing. You.
You will never know the longing that the three of us have
had for you. Hoping you would change. Hoping you would realize we are valuable.
Hoping you would understand that our Love is important. You were wanted in our
arms. We needed you, not just to make a house, but we needed you to be with us.
We needed to get to know each other. Because we actually did have fun with you.
We saw how much you loved being with kids. We saw how you actually cared to
make us laugh and to make a world that was filled with dreams and fantasies,
lifting us up to a different plane of seeing it all so very lightly.
We’ve held a space for you all these years – even though
we’ve come to an exasperated resolve that there is no use but some memory of
your heartbeat that made us whole.
Which peeks out every so often when we meet for a meal. This man, my
father, sits across from me with stories of his many forays of the seedy-side
of humanity. A man who seems to have been searching for freedom by playing
games all of his life. A man who continues to leave us through his many ideas
of the next get-rich-quick scheme in his mind.
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