Ruminations on things that should not be ruminated on

"Relationships have always made me anxious.  I am always afraid of a man finding the strength to leave me and as a result I have always left.  I know this most evidently when I think of my mother who could never cry enough and begged my father not to leave every time they fought.  He always did. On one particular occasion my father loaded up his car to leave late at night but not before my mother stopped him and shoved us in his face “if you are going to leave look at your children first!” She shouted, pleading, running down the steps of our semi-attached house with marble tiles. A small living space but always a lavish lining.  My father backed out of the drive way but not before my mother carried my brother in her arms, screaming at my sister and I to get outside, crying the entire time and telling us to say goodbye to our father.  I was not older than 6 but I knew what she was doing.  My father spoke sweetly to us and said he would be back in the morning.  I went to bed with my mother sobbing not knowing if I would ever see my father again.  The next day he returned.

The following years I grew up feeling detached from my father.  A classmate cried everyday in the 2nd grade and told everyone she hated her father. I said I do to.  I went home and told my mother I did not love my father.  I never saw him anyway.  He always worked.

I didn’t hate him.  But the rift never really went away like a dagger in each of our hearts or a river growing wider between us or before us.  It took many years to build a damn and we both know it’ll take many more.  Growing up the man who as my mother stated is “the reason we have clothes to wear and food to eat” never said I love you.  He never attended my softball games and every year the dagger grew stronger and the river grew deeper that seemed to nearly drown my mother.

As the years passed you grew softer. When I was 20 you tried to learn to be a father.  By then men who took your place were already too cruel than just an absentee father.  But I learned to let myself feel the love I had for you boil under the surface drying up the river that grew every year.  I will learn to erase the damage from the unblanketed nights you provided me with and the marks of the men who came after.  At 23 I will wipe the ocean up that bleeds too wide between me w/ a towel and I won’t stop until there’s a drought and the heat within me dries it faster than the inches of tears that piled higher than my mother could ever plead.  I was always my mother’s daughter."

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"Each year the leaves grow thicker and the memory of grandmother grows more distant.  I can still see her picking the rich, velvet leaves in her garden and then soon later rolling them in her hands amongst cooked rice and lemon spices.  Her hands always looked so tired, her face always looking far elsewhere.  Perhaps she was thinking of my grandfather, a silent man who was rumored to have affairs with many women. I was 12 when he died.  The only recollection I have of him is his stone cold face, never speaking, sitting on the couch watching TV while my grandmother always looking off and rolling the picked velvet leaves and rice.  

My mother and my father worked a lot and as a result much of my time was caught in the pauses between my grandmother and grandfather's living room. I learned English with an accent.  My father learned from his father so it goes.  When I was in 6th, 5th, or 4th grade my aunt divorced my uncle with two black eyes.  No one hid the truth from me."