I am my father's daughter.
An underachieving overachiever that has accomplished nothing.
Without a doubt I am his for I have only seen this in one other person.
Coffee and cigarettes
Careless whispers to a wife
Careless promises to a son.
I am standing in these size eleven boots.
Feet too small, heart too big.
Brain too broken.
Burnt out but flourishing in the grim.
Or grim's hollow or whatever!
Look I am just like the guy but look nothing like him.
I started to talk like him
Act like him.
I found an old picture of him in a brown shirt.
I made it my mission to find one just like that.
I did. I wore it and nothing.
I started to love like him.
A hopeless approach to everything.
Loving too much, too inconsistently.
Silent whips in the sky, electricity without a word.
Too heavy, too open. Too much.
But she never did say it was enough.
She never did admit that she was just a shell of who she was supposed to be and I am still trying to convince the same woman that she is loved. But then again maybe, if all you've known is to seek validation, you crumble at the thought of the purpose of her pursuit being futile. So I forgive her. Just like he forgave her. Everyday with an echoing patience. I feel what he felt. It is quite difficult to exist for a person who doesn't think that you're enough. And so that has become my prison, the way it became his. Loving somebody too much that you can't help but forgive their transgressions.... even if they are only designated and directed to you or rather, it feels that way. It is quite difficult.
I started to work like him.
Avoiding my mother and brother, hoping they will understand that sometimes it all makes a little more sense if you're closer to the job. Anxious or not, the underlying obsession in proving that I am more than an incomplete degree is wading. Thrusting myself into the hope that one day my big break will come through. Someone will ACTUALLY hear me sing but until then I am confined to this, just like he was, an emptiness and an obtuse disregard for my general existence as a person.
I started to lose friends like him.
My father never had friends. How do I know this? At his memorial service, the priest asked one of his friends to stand up as a representative of his friends. I thought I knew silence. I thought I knew sadness. I came to know shame. Not in the people who refused to claim a dead man in the face of his family but rather I felt shame for him for the first time. Little did I know, that I would come to call this shame my acquaintance. With every friendship I make, I seem to repeat the same mistakes. Too much then too little then too much then nothing at all.... given the fact that he was the saddest I had ever seen him before he died, I assume this.... It all became too much. Deafening conversations about non-existent things and even louder thoughts of guilt "I should've listened to my father, I should've listened to my father" and unfortunately it was too late. So the days became heavy and the nights became stubbornly long. The people around him began to fall to the ground like bodies of men in a war they do not understand. One by one, a massacre of memories and sentimental objectification. The stains on the necks of friends he used to trust, wrung out tolerance and siphoned truancy. My father let himself die before I got the chance to bury him. I was the only friend he never lost and yet here I am still feeling like.... maybe he didn't even see me as his friend. And that is what fucken hurts.
Because friends don't do that to friends. Friends don't stop mid-conversation. They don't make plans and not follow through on them. They don't show you new places and never ever go to them with you. They do not show you how to use a camera and then disappear from the frame. They don't just cease to exist from your life without an actual reason. But then again... I think this is the only kind of friendship I have ever known.
I seek comfort in the fact that the sun has seemed to wash this over me consistently. And her reflection on the moon,not through it like myself, makes everything okay for a lot of time.
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