What has been broken

This is a work of non-fiction. That contains topics of mental health issues, sexual violence, and substance abuse.

My father was always a secretive person. Everything I knew about his childhood and early life before he became a father was information that I ciphered from him like a mystic in a fairy tale. Looking for signs and clues in the scratches on stones and in the positions of stars. He was a family man who cried in church, but who would wield rage like a weapon against his wife. I was both fascinated and petrified of my father. He could be both loving and dejecting, compassionate and indifferent, and I never really knew which version of him I would receive.

I always tried to be the good daughter. When he showed up five, sometimes six hours late from picking me up from an after school activity I would never tantrum about how hurt and humiliated I felt. I would often sit and watch the sky slowly fade from tangerine orange to warm burgundy. Patiently waiting for him to arrive. When he finally did pull into the parking lot, apologetic and sheepish, ice cream in hand; I would smile and take the front seat. Quick to accept and forgive. My childish worries and anxieties placated with the sweetness of chocolate.

The faith I held in my fathers love was unwavering. Even in his most violent moments I believed he loved me. Until one day during my junior year of high school I stopped believing. The rift happened slowly. Like a riptide that takes you out to sea I didn't know how much I truly resented him until after I he abandoned the family. he unceremoniously left my mother and siblings crumpled and broken like used coke cans. Now, as I look back, I associate the epicenter of all the chaos and devastation around one single even, and his name was Sam.

I started dating when I was sixteen. Naive and sheltered I knew nothing of boundaries. I was the product of a haphazard christian upbringing that ended at age thirteen and that had done little to prepare me for the realities of the real world and dating. I was tired of boys from my high school. They were so clumsy with their words and ashamed of their feelings. Kissing them was always too lustful, a race to remove articles of clothing. I wanted to know what a "real" relationship felt like so I decided to date men. Not because I felt so mature but because I was looking for safety, security, acceptance, a deeper kind of love, and in a very unrealized way I was looking for my father.

At Seventeen I met Sam. He was twenty-eight, tall, dark, and handsome, and I liked how he would sometimes stare at me while we were on a date. There was a hunger in it that made me feel both desirable and dangerous. Like a femme fatale in a Bond movie. He could be extremely sweet, and always acted interested in the day-to-day minutia of my life. It was comforting to have someone I could talk to, and I foolishly associated his concern as genuine.

It was on a particularly cold January day that my father called to let me know he would be in town and asked if I wanted to have dinner with him. Of course I wanted to spend time with him, but I also had an after school job. My father agreed to pick me up after my last class, drop me off at my job, and then pick me up afterwards for pizza. I was elated.

As the hours of the day slowly dissolved onto the pavement, an icy rain began to fall on the curb, and my father was not answering any of my phone calls, or text messages. a fist of disappointment and sorrow began to twist in the pit of my stomach. Tears burned in the corners of my eyes and I slowly began to realize that my father was not going to be picking me up. Flashbacks of my childhood flipped through my mind like a movie reel. He did this before, but back then he alway eventually showed up. Anger began to erode away the sorrow, and now all I wanted to do was pound my father's face into the shiny cold road until he was unrecognizable. I decided to call Sam.

He responded on the second buzz of my phone. At first he seemed hesitant about picking me up, as he had other appointments and errands to run. I flirtatiously let him know that I would be so appreciative if he did, and that I would make it worth his while. What I meant by that was a kiss, or grope, something I assumed would satiate his own carnal desires. Sam said that he would come to get me, but that he had to make a quick pit-stop at his house first. I wasn't in a position where I could say no. On the drive there he raked his hand through his hair and said he had an idea of how I could re-pay him for picking me up from school. I smiled casually, but I felt strange. His eyes were two black pools that looked menacingly at me. My palms began to sweat but acted like nothing was wrong and his demeanor wasn't making me uncomfortable.

I had never been to his house before. It was a one story ranch the color of burnt leaves and that smelled of menthol cigarettes. I had no idea that Sam smoked. He told me to follow him into his bedroom, that he had something to show me. Once I was standing in the dimly lit room he locked the door behind me. I could feel my face going hot and I began to push my mind into a fuzzy hazy place where I was no longer connected to my body. I was no longer apart of the moment or the room that I was in. I was far away. A pin point in space.

When he dropped me off at work I felt like an empty husk. I could'n cry, and I wouldn't allow myself to acknowledge what had just happened. I felt dirty and ugly. Like something old and used. I was ashamed that I had trusted Sam, and that shame is what kept me silent. At work I went through the motions, and tried not to think about the pain between my legs, or the way his hand had felt on my mouth. After that horrible day Sam never called me, and I never spoke to him again. What Sam had forced me to do had become an invisible scar. A wound that no one else saw and that I nursed in the privacy of bathrooms.

My father never knew about what had transpired between Sam and I. It wasn't until many years later during a therapy session that I angrily declared that if my father had been there, had made me even the smallest priority I wouldn't have called Sam. I wouldn't have spent the rest of my teen years hiding something horrid that was placed into my life like a package of rotting meat. It takes time and years of re-wiring old patterns to allow true healing to take root.

My father left this world in a web of secrecy and lies. The shattered relationship that stood between us was never healed in the conventional way that I would have wanted. Instead I was able to heal through journal entries and hours of meditation. I now look at the man my father was as a little boy who never learned how to love himself, and by default his children. My father grew up in a world that encouraged men to be removed from their feelings. To put their own needs above anything else, and whose specific brand of christianity allowed him to continue down a path of self-serving entitlement. I found compassion for the sad little boy who was desperately looking for love, but I will never forget the hurt and abandonment I was forced to suffer through. I chose forgiveness for myself. I no longer wanted to spend the rest of my life hovering within a bubble of rage. Forgiving my father and consciously choosing to not be the person that he was is a choice that I make everyday.