the arsonist's match

on having a father, and being fatherless

The only evidence I have that he ever loved me is the pink binder that sits on a closet shelf, my name scratched into its side. It’s filled with pieces of me: old report cards, perfect attendance certificates, baby teeth. These are the only things that prove he ever paid attention, and they serve as a marker for when he stopped.

I don’t know what to say anymore when people ask about my dad. Mostly because that honorific doesn’t feel right, as it’s no longer deserved. I don’t correct them when they refer to my ‘parents,’ even though I’ve only ever felt like I had one. Sometimes, I tell people that he’s dead. Trying it on for size because, in a way, he is—and it’s much easier than explaining that he’s a monster lurking around corners and skulking around a house he no longer has a right to be in. Slithering yet heavy-footed, but a ghost, to me, who does her best to make him nothing but a figment from a past life.

Each night, I climb into bed and mentally cross off the day, counting down until (legally) he has to remove himself from our lives. Until the house I grew up in, the one I learned to make myself smaller in, came to hate him in, can no longer be his comfort.

Often, over the last few years, I’ve wondered if I’m cruel. If when people make the argument for familial forgiveness before they rest their hand on my shoulder and furrow their brow in concern and say but he’s your dad and I refuse both sentiments with barely a blink, they believe me to be awful. Heartless. Callous. Wretched. Then, I wonder if I’m worse for not caring what they think. Then—and this is the worst part—I wonder if that’s some of the ugliness he has gifted to me.

Growing up and seeing your parents' flaws is like losing your religion. I don't believe in God anymore. I don't believe in my father either.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

I’ve rejected the him in me my entire life: the round face, the dark hair, and the way it waves. When Dr. K suggested that maybe there are some good things about myself I’ve gotten from him, I wanted to shove my laptop off the desk, carrying her with it. But isn’t that violence, that impulse, one of the worst things about the man responsible for half of me? She asked me to name something good about him and I couldn’t. Not out of spite, or anger (because I’m finally past that), or refusal. I couldn’t do it because I don’t know if I believe that there is any good in him. At least, not anymore.

But then what does that mean for me? And does thinking of what that means for me make me selfish? Unempathetic? I don’t want to be those things, but openly caring for someone who has done nothing but inflict wound after would doesn’t serve me. I need to be stitched up, not torn open. I need to be whole and healed if I’m ever going to help my family out of this burning house filled with smoke.

I don’t feel bad about leaving him behind. At least I don’t think I do. Not when every good memory I might’ve held onto of him has been burned so deep to the center they’re nothing but ash. Every gift he’s given me I’ve lost, seemingly sucked into a cosmic vortex as if the universe knew one day I’d want no reminders.

I’ve made myself sick over the fantasy of forgiveness. Considered it with the same seriousness I once considered holding a razor to my wrist. There’s nothing in it for me. Without an acknowledgement of all the burns, daggers, and broken promises, there’s no peace. I won’t forgive someone who won’t ask for it, who won’t even admit there are things to forgive.

I can’t give grace where it’s been previously trampled on; can’t extend a hand that’s still suffering from the snake’s bite; can’t keep the door open when it does nothing but feed the never-ending fire. I have nothing else to offer but my back, miles away, already covered in scars from forgiving and forgetting longer than was healthy.

My body shakes sometimes, when he’s too close to me for too long, when the film I’ve set between us slips. My heart thuds in my ears and my stomach turns and all I can see is metal, and broken glass, and a hand coming towards my face; when all I can hear is his yelling, and the cursed litany of i hate you and i wish you were dead; when all I can smell is spit.

I’ve cried hunched over in my bed and in that of my lover, wondering if everything he’s ever said about me could be true. Clawing at my own chest, desperate with hope that whatever ugliness might reside there could be pulled out. I’m afraid to be a mother because of who he is as a father. He is why I drink down praise like it’s water in a drought, why I will only ever be hard on myself, why I can’t admit to hunger without feeling less than. He is every awful thing that’s ever happened to me, and the manifestation of every bad thing I will ever do.

How do you wash your hands clean of something embedded into your fingerprints? How do you cut out what your heart might be made of? How do you hold onto someone you’ve never met and forget a person you’ve known your whole life?

He lights the match and cries when everything goes up in flames.

Maybe I am my father’s daughter, but he no longer belongs to me.