Thoughts for the Eye

Am I the Rage I Inherit?

I am not my father.

I would never be absent for my child.

He was there yet he wasn't. 

He was there for my first steps, my first words, yet I cannot recall him at any of the peak moments of my life.

He did not write my roots, no. 

My roots creak and ache with the longing for a father but my mind denies them—those splintered memories, those phantom echoes.

My father tormented my household with the screaming of a riot and the rage that you could feel a hundred feet away. 

His rage lingered inside the walls, a hum that still lingers inside of me, like a stormcloud waiting to break.

I would like to tell you that I memorized the sound of his footsteps and the sound of him coming home because I loved him, but that was not the case.

No, I memorized them because the air would grow heavy and even though I ran to him whenever I heard those familiar keys, each step was the drumbeat of my dread, that my father might evaporate the second he saw my mother.

I could not speak to him, I could not ask him things that I was truly curious about. I had always thought that he would become the monster my mother faced, towards me.

I walked past children with their fathers, holding their hands and laughing with them. My father had done so but it had no promise of love, I felt only the hollow weight of a love I had always known. 

I had begged my mother to leave him, but all I could do was listen—listen to her tears as she whispered things a child should never bear witness to, her pain pressing into me as I felt that I was the one who should mend it, to hold her broken pieces together when I was already shattered myself.

I don't blame her, yet I wish I could have had the opportunity to just truly be a child. 

To just once go to a park and not dread going home.

I have happy memories of my childhood but for some forbidden reason, no matter how deeply I search for them, I cannot find them.

People say I look like my father, my mother tells me my hands are like my father's, and at that moment I want to tear myself away to sever the connection from every body part that resonates even slightly with him, as if by force I could will myself free of this inheritance, this curse of his blood.

How could I have the hands of my father?

The hands that tormented my mother?

I tell people my biggest fear is heights, but truly?

My biggest fear is my rage, which simmers beneath my skin. The rage that is his rage.

And that thought, that pinching, agonizing thought, is my biggest fear.

That maybe I am my father.