not to love, not to long, not to call

just to go

father’s day was a couple days ago. i never know when father’s day is. i’m only aware of it when someone casually brings it up in conversation and only then will my ears perk up and i can’t help but ask, oh when is that? i don’t remember because i can’t remember the last time i cared but i still ask, every time, i still ask.

i don’t have any photos of my dad in my phone. i only have the photos of the polaroids i took using my phone while sorting through the boxes of photos my mom keeps on the floor of the spare bedroom.

sometimes when i am tired or when i am bored and i am alone, i look through my favorites album on my phone to find the old photos of them. in one, my dad’s arm is slung around my mom’s shoulders, she’s turned towards him and she’s tucked under the crook of his arm and she holds him back; her nailpolish is red. if i zoom in, i can see her beauty mark right above her upper lip, i can see the shadow of her pink blush high on her cheekbones, her eyeshadow looks blueish gray and heavily lines her lids. she looks so young and cool. my dad’s face is glowing pink and red from drinking, his eyes look squinty and sharp like he’s having a hard time focusing, his hair is black and full and wavy. he’s wearing a skinny black tie and a grey tweed jacket and he looks edgy and young and confident in a way that can only be created out of absolute necessity.

but my favorite polaroid of them is on the day they eloped. my dad is looking straight into the camera. he looks proud. he is wearing black sunglasses and a grey suit and in one hand he holds a bunch of white and baby pink balloons while his other hand is wrapped around my mom’s shoulders. my mom is holding a bouquet of flowers, her hair is longer, she is wearing white and i don’t know if she looks happy or scared or sad or regretful. i always try reading her face but even after 35 years of knowing her, i can’t tell. i convince myself she was happy. the car they’re leaning on has just married scrawled with white paint on the rear window. i wonder who wrote that. was it them? was it a friend of theirs? the bottom of the polaroid says july 26, 1986. i don’t know whose handwriting it is. it doesn’t look like my mom’s but i can’t remember what my dad’s handwriting looks like.

sometimes i wonder what would have happened if my mom married someone else. what life would she be living? would she be happier? sometimes we talk about it together and my mom tells me about her ex-boyfriend that she dated before she started dating my dad. she tells me how they went camping and how he would fly down to san diego to see her while she was in college. when i listen to her talk about him, i hear the nostalgia in her voice and when she tells me about how he came from a good family and how his family was wealthy, i worry she tells me these details because she’s reminding me and herself that once upon a time, she could have married someone different. i ask her if she ever wishes she could go back in time and she says no because then i wouldn’t exist. ethan wouldn’t exist. so she says no. i understand but i still wonder for the both of us.

when i was younger, i used to write about my dad more often. i used to romanticize the hurt and anger he made me feel and i wore that anger as some sort of badge. when i was still a teenager verging on adulthood, i wrote about ex-boyfriends and my fraught relationship with my dad and an older more accomplished writer responded to one of my posts and told me that one day, i would be a great writer but i just had to go through more hell. i relished their observation because it made me feel important and weathered in a way that i was strangely so desperate for. i wanted to be understood as a girl who had suffered.

as i got older, the idea of my dad and his short place in my life became more abstract yet more clear to me and i began to use my fading anger toward him as an excuse for my insecurity, my jealousy, my fear of being not enough. when i picked a fight with jeremy because my jealousy turned to rage and my insecurity made me feel terrified like a caged animal, i blamed my dad. you don’t know what i’ve been through! i would yell. sometimes, i would repeat the story of how when i was sixteen, my dad told me that every man will cheat on me because that’s just what men do. it took me years to realize that i did not believe him then and i do not believe him now but when i pushed myself into a corner, terrified of losing love or what i thought was love, i would pull that memory out like a weapon. it was my last defense. i would retell the story with anger in my voice, my sadness was genuine and my fear was real but back then, i didn’t understand that i didn’t need to hold onto these things in hopes of being understood and seen.

when i was nineteen or twenty, when i first decided to leave my mom’s home, i told my dad first. i told him over two overly sweet lukewarm coffees and one burnt tongue at an empty starbucks. we smoked a cigarette together in the parking lot and i told him because i knew he would support me for the wrong reasons but that was enough. with one raised eyebrow and the flick of his cigarette against the pavement, he hugged me good-bye and told me, just go. i came to him because i wanted the comfort of knowing i had one parent, no matter how distant, give me permission and i know i made him feel powerful like i trusted him as a dad. when i remember that transaction from so many years ago, i feel myself getting sad.

i don’t like my dad. i am not even sure i can say i love him. we don’t speak, not even for birthdays or holidays. i’ve never searched for my dad on facebook but i came across his profile randomly a few weeks ago and saw a photo of him for the first time in years. he looks the same, nothing had really changed and i felt some relief. i am no longer angry with him. i don’t resent him. i don’t hold him responsible for the way i approach relationships and i don’t blame him for my feelings of insecurity and my fears of not being enough. i don’t absolve my dad of the things he chose to do but i also learned that i don’t need to hold onto it. i don’t want to hold onto it. and maybe that’s why i like looking at the old polaroids of my parents when they were young and beautiful and only cared about being together. i look at their elopement polaroid and i find comfort in knowing my dad loved my mom then. i know she trusted him with her secrets and i know that he wanted to give her a good life and i know that he hoped for a good life together. i feel like he maybe knew their life wouldn’t be perfect and maybe often times, it would be really hard but i don’t think he wanted to end up without us.

i didn’t know who my dad was when he was my dad, but now that he’s a stranger to me or maybe it’s because i’m older but i feel like i understand him more. and when i look at him in that old polaroid, i view him tenderly like he’s a kid and not a grown man. i look at him in his pressed wedding suit with his arm wrapped around my mom and i have an adult understanding that sometimes there are those who go through hell and find comfort in that hell and no matter how hard they try, they don’t know how to find their way out of it.