I never had a Father.
I don’t say that for sympathy, more by way of explanation.
I would imagine that having a Father, being in that situation, he would share his knowledge. Impart wisdom, if you will.
“Here is how you shave, son.”
Or, “You have to save for retirement, because the world is uncertain.”
A Father could show you how to… Well, I’ve run out of words, because I don’t know. Like I said before, I never had a Father.
I do wonder how it would have felt, to have him touch my head and tell me I did well at something. Or if he said he was proud of me. I wonder how I might have felt as a person, if I didn't have absentee parents? If, when I was growing up, I had parents that wanted to be around me.
A Father that didn't treat me like a sock he came in, back in the early 70's.
I did meet him once, when I was 36.
I was working in the shop I owned, selling bicycles, of all things. A boy came in with his girlfriend, he was High School age. And there was something about him I couldn't leave alone. He was my brother, of course, but neither of us knew it at the time.
And as we talked, somehow questions were asked, and the truth was revealed. He told our Father, and our Father invited me for dinner.
When I arrived it was just him, alone in his house. I guess I was hoping for a family reunion- to meet the sister and brothers I’d never met.
But it was just him in the house. He drove us to a bistro, we ate a roast, prepared by some other people I’d never met. He may have known them, that information is unclear.
And he offered me only one piece of advice. I’d learned to shave, you see. I had a superannuation account. I worked out these things on my own, through trial and error.
He told me that “All women are crazy.”
I left him there, to dine with his prejudices, and we never met again.
He was quite useless, ultimately.
I never got any warning. I saw the signs, but didn’t speak the language yet. But if I did, I would have learned about now before I arrived.
You turn a corner, you see.
In life, we turn a lot of corners, mostly banal. But once in a while you turn a corner that matters, and the thing about it is you don’t know it matters until years later, when you rue the day or celebrate it.
I turned a corner, and walked down a hallway, and at the time it just felt like 'more life', but in reality it was like that ramp onto a plane. Once you walk down it, the powers that be won't let you come back through.
And when that plane lands, you're suddenly 44 years old. And where before, you used to walk into rooms and be noticed, now you're invisible. You are irrelevant. And if people do notice you it's only with annoyance, because you're standing in front of something they want to look at. Something that isn't ugly.
Young people lack foresight. Lack an overview. We all feel invincible, don’t we? At least, as invincible as one can feel when you’re crippled by self doubt, by unfulfilled ambition, by fear, by suicidal thoughts.
But one day you realise your best years are behind you. Far behind you. And you wasted them being scared and caring about the wrong people. Trying to fit into a world where you never fit in, instead of just standing on top of a mountain and letting the world speak to you directly.
You realise you’re ugly now. You have a smell about you that you can’t wash off. Like old people have a smell, and maybe they don’t know it either.
You realise you’ve spent your whole life waiting for the feeling of sadness to end, and you realise that it never will. You’ll be alone on your deathbed, a tear running down your cheek as you realise your sadness was your best friend through everything you’ve been through. The only thing that never left you for something better.
You were the best in the world at cultivating sadness.
And it occurs to me that it would have been nice to have a Father to explain all of that. To sit me down and tell me right to my face that your body will fall apart and get fat and disgust people. And you will be too sad, bereft of energy to change.
That you will lie on your bed in a kind of shock for four years and counting, and if people do see you running an errand they have no idea, that you're not really there at all. You're exploring the past in your memories, trying to find a flight back to mattering.
And you will know it’s pointless anyway, because you could carve a new body for yourself but you’ll still be dead inside. You've seen too much now.
There is more to a man than the physical, of course. I’ve met some women who for reasons that remain unknown to me, felt that I had something to offer.
And they have tried to touch my body, and there was a time I would have loved them to. But my body now is a thing I hide. And the thought of lying with a woman fills me with revulsion, not for the act, but for what they would see.
And I’m not mature enough, I lack the humanity to understand that they might not care about that. Making them laugh, feel special, understanding and listening- all of these things can, in the right person, engender affections.
All I can think about in those moments before I reject them and make them hurt and angry is the horror of what I’ve become under my clothing. And all of the distance between my heart and anything that exists on this planet.
I don’t know what self love is, I never did.
And I don’t know how to describe the feelings I have now, because I’m feeling them too much. Sure, I can name them, but further analysis requires understanding and distance. And right now they blanket me. They appear as skin does. They’re me, and I am them.
If I survive them, I may give them names, but I won’t survive them. That skin will just grow thicker until it becomes the soil in my grave.
The truth is, the only time I feel anything approaching happiness, is when I exist in denial regarding the fact I am slowly falling apart.
I know this is not the end, but I can see it from here.
I can see it from here.
