maybe things are different in another life

 hello, lovelies!

i wrote this earlier this year for my father's birthday. well, my biological father, not the father that i speak about presently in my other posts. my biological father passed away when i was little. i was his girl, and losing him was the first time i was really affected by death. it was odd, knowing he was gone. one moment, he was alive and my sister and i were playing in the living room, and the next our mother comes to us and tells us he's dead. it was so strange, that out of body feeling i had as we walked back to my parents room. my mother's room. as stated in the writing, i was a tad bit drunk when i wrote this... anyways

    patrick

it's a strange feeling, forgetting someone.

it starts out so small that you don't even realize it until you try to remember and you find that you simply cannot. it's starting, realizing that something you thought you'd always remember is now something you've so easily forgotten.

a sun damaged sepia photo, subjects blurred and smeared, unrecognizable, is all that's left. another odd feeling is knowing that i now only have two friends who could have met him. could have spoken to him, could have known him. only two people i chose to be in my life that could say that he existed. my own sister, his flesh and blood, can't even remember him.

this year he would have been fifty-five. fifteen years since i last saw him, since he last gazed at me with eyes that match mine. his birthday is on valentine's day. was on valentine's day.

the startling realization that i can no longer remember my own father's voice was a painful one. lost to the sands of time, sun bleached and worn by fifteen years under the california coastal sun are my memories of him, encrusted with sea salt. i cannot recall the last time he told me he loved me, the last time he held me in his arms. of course, i didn't know that those moments would be the last time. i was only six, ten days out from my birthday.

hindsight, they say.

he never got to teach me to tie my shoes or ride a bike. he didn't get to watch me become who i am.

yet, when i look in the mirror, i am met with a glimpse of him.

i have his hair, untamed. his mouth, unruly. his face, forever

etched into mine. it's like seeing a ghost of the things i

could have become, i should have become. but here i am; twenty-one and completely and utterly alone. drunken hands tremble and wishing well eyes overflow as i write this on what would have, could have, should have been his fifty-fifth birthday.