I look back in time, through a telescope

I don't condemn you

I don’t recognize him anymore.

I can look back in time, rose-tinted goggles on, and see the man I once looked up to, see the man that fed me and gave me his sleeve when I needed to sneeze, but he’s as far away from me as a star. I look through a telescope, squinting to make out the details. A ball of light, held together by its own gravity, shining for everyone but me.

A star is meant to die. Its own energy is too much to sustain. It exhausts itself, it exhausts others. He exhausts himself, he exhausts others, he exhausts me. He’ll die too, a black hole forming where the plasma once was, pulling in anyone caught in his posthumously immense force. He’ll pull me in, I know this. I’m preparing for it. I’ll relive the late night talks, the movies I was too young to watch, the games I was too young to play, the words he allowed me to speak as my brain still developed. I grew out of the novelty of having a parent I saw more as a friend. It wasn’t fun anymore, only disquieting. I no longer wanted to see him on the weekends. I no longer wanted to pretend like I identified with the hate that often spewed from his mouth, the prejudice, the misogyny, the loathing for anyone who didn’t look like the characters on the screen. A Black man brainwashed into believing that the white man would save him. I realized his rhetoric wasn’t facetious, and it terrified me.

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“I could build a tower with the times I was pretending. Try to microdose to immunity, but I’ll never see the ending.”

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His words eventually became pellets to me, small nuisances that have the potential to break skin. Not life-threatening, just painful enough to train oneself into believing everything is okay, over time. Microdosing to pain, trying to build immunity. There’s no immunity from your parents. They know your weakest spots and they push them liberally with little regard to the possibility of it changing your life forever.

Through the telescope, I see my old campus. So beautiful during the winter, snow cascading over the pointed towers, blades of green grass poking through the white, the campus devoid of life, though the occasional student walking to and from their dorm, hood over their head, arms wrapped around their body in an attempt to stay warm. I always preferred the cold to the humid heat. It’s the biting winters I miss the most from campus. Frostbite on the skin, like the pellets I wanted to escape from; I sometimes find myself missing the sting. He never wanted me to go to that school.

His biting words, the ones I chose to ignore, the ones I nodded to absentmindedly; I miss them too. When I close my eyes, I can see the man he used to be: Tall, strong, rough around the edges, the faint smell of cigarette smoke on his fingertips, a smile that’s my own. Perhaps he wasn’t the one that changed. Perhaps he was always like this, I just never saw it. Most boys see their fathers as heroes, as men to aspire to be. Most boys have that fantasy shattered. Most boys realize they’ve become them, and it eats them up inside. My fear of loneliness, my fear of dying alone, they don’t hold a candle to the fear that I am him in more than just appearance. He must be lonely now. The thought upsets me.

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“Someone chopped you down. Thought you’d just fall in the woods, but she heard that sound. No, I don’t remember the last time we spoke.”

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No one hears the sound of a tree falling in the woods. The day he is chopped down, I imagine the saying to remain true. He’ll fall in mute, too prideful to let out a pained yell or a stifled sob. A man doesn’t cry, after all. A man doesn’t feel. No one will hear it, except for me. I’ll cry the tears he refused to let out, I’ll tell others that he was an imperfect man, one that I sometimes despised, one that I saw in the mirror every day.

It’s morbid talking about him in this way, I know, but lately my mind wanders. I’ve had dreams of his passing. Although I can remember the many funerals, I can never remember how it made me feel. I wake up and immediately feel a sense of dread, sure, but in my dreams, when I’m experiencing those moments, it’s all lost on me. I’m not the man he wanted me to be, so yes, I’ll cry for him when the time comes. I’ll do the things he doesn’t want me to do, feel the things he doesn’t want me to feel, because a real man doesn’t hide in his father’s shadow. No, I don’t condemn him.