Brine
I am so annoyed with myself. I want ask for something but I’m told that it would ruin everything. I don’t mean to blame people giving me advice, when it’s also because I am a coward, that I don’t ask for what I want. I’d describe myself as someone who does not have stage fright, does not fear rejection, who has talked to more strangers than not. But I am a coward when I want sweetness. I’m told the person I want to ask things of, does not have the emotional maturity to understand what I would demand of them, which is why I want to demand it of them. We are idiots.
My dad left me thinking he wouldn’t come back, so I could move on without having to learn how to beg him to stay, to find out if he was paying attention. I had to pretend he was watching me from afar. I had to pretend my livelihood and happiness mattered to him. I pretend he looks me up online once in a while. I pretend he actually didn’t want us all to die.
I am never going to hear what I need to hear because you do not want to hear what I have to say. I am annoyed by the fact that I cannot move on from this peculiar task. I am begging you just to let me know you care.
I am living in an imaginary world pretending there’s a version of the next life where the order of how we meet changes, and everything along with it. First, I am a father, and then you are me. We forgive each other before we fall in love. We fall in love desperately, by the way, and I take everything but this turns you on. We are the ruins. I’m sorry if the thought of my father and I falling in love in an alternate version of the universe makes you uncomfortable. I’d like you to think about why that is so.
My French friend Audrey told me when she was little she believed she was going to marry her father, and that was because she didn’t understand what marriage was. Imagine my surprise when I met her father, discovering he was smoking hot.
I’m sorry if hearing a grown woman complain about her dad, having dad issues, being a dad issue, is too cliche for your unsentimental self. But I keep telling you, if you listen closely: I believe you’re ready to hear the very intelligent, erudite, sensible, logical and rational and actually intellectually sophisticated, learned things I have to tell you about the misery enshrining my desire for you.
None of what I am saying is true.
Every story I’ve told you is a lie. I keep making up stories and refuse to turn away. Let’s see if you can detect the truth. I keep pretending everything else around me is what makes me valuable to this world while my mind sits in the brine of this miserable desire. The fantasy is an eye. You can’t tickle yourself but you can certainly taste your own tears. I do not recommend you taste mine.
I am an idiot. It’s my single virtue. I am embarrassed. It is a state of being. I am so embarrassed I want to die. I will keep repeating that I am embarrassed until it beats the life out of the part of me that is annoyed I am still talking. And when the sadness shows up, we will let her win, because sadness is the only way I know dad was ever paying attention.
Dad tells me to be a good person. Just be a good person. Am I good? The real question is: am I good enough.
