Over The Horizon

Chapter IV

Every time I got mad at my dad I always felt like I was one more step away from him. It was like loving him less little by little, slowly realizing that even the love for a parent can be shattered gradually.
I don't believe in hate since I've never despised anyone. And now I can't help but dislike that piece of myself that allowed me to compress with so much pain my dad's heart.
He used to propose something and I rejected his idea even before he stopped talking.  He then started begging me to listen, and I hated not giving him enough satisfaction. I only knew how to humiliate him repeatedly. I always said that we couldn't have the same likings, it was inevitable for us to enjoy different things. I didn't like chess, sailing, Bjorn Larson's books, ping pong, tennis, western movies, not even the food that he prepared so carefully for me every day when I returned from school. Anger, in spite of everything, is a fundamental part of describing this immense love that a child feels towards a parent.

What my father and I had in common was the veil of sadness that always covered our faces. He was the one who called it like that, a veil. Ours was — and mine remains— a partially visible sadness. It was almost unnoticeable to the eyes of those whom him and I labeled as "ephemeral", the superficial and corrupted people that listened to their most worldly pleasures, the ones we never considered. That sadness was reflected in the photos, in the most immediate shots, in the difficulty we both had to smile. There is no photo where my father shows a real smile.
We have never been able to grasp the essence of that feeling. In part I pushed myself to believe in a cause similar to the deepest loneliness. Yet I can't understand what made my father so attached to solitude.
Being lonely, yes, but of what?

As a teenager I wrote an entire diary about loneliness. My mother must remember this very well too. It was this little diary with the blue cover, the sticker of a rose glued on top. To write I used the black ink of a special pen that I bought during every exit in the nearest city.
And I wrote, I just wrote, I didn't do anything else.

Without that solitude, without that memory of abandonment, I would have never became a writer. I would have never written, I wouldn't have been able to do it. It was that perennial sadness that gave me inspiration, that made words blossom in my head and allowed me to fix them as I liked, to make those ideas of mine invincible. The sadness I still share with my father has made me who I am.

One day my dad noticed the blue notebook that I kept next to the bedside table and started observing it. He was clearly intrigued. He was dying out of curiosity to read the sentences hidden inside. But in front of his curious face there was me: I was protecting those words with my presence.

"What is that?" he spoke naively, as if he didn't know.
"It's a blue notebook," I said. I added that It's a secret, that It's only mine. He made a quick exclamation. He was driven down by a curiosity defeated by my discretion. There was nothing else he could do.
When I came back from school I always checked that the diary was still in its place and in the same position in which I had left it. I used to put a pencil just above it to be able to trace a possible displacement after my return. The fear of such an intrusion, of my secrets being discovered, was truly immense. Yet I can no longer remember what that young me was really hiding.

Another day, I saw my father reading the diary. He was so quiet, absolved in that reading, that I felt an inexplicable fury beginning to form in my skin. I wanted to yell at him, snatch the notebook out of his hands, break those rectangular-framed glasses he put on every time he read. Before that moment I had staged in my head a possible reaction, an escape plan to defeat his curiosity.
Instead I didn't do anything, I just observed him and left. I will come back to take the diary later, when he was gone. Angry with myself, I will throw the notebook to the fire and let it burn to ashes.
I never found the courage to start writing another diary.