"He won't pick up, Mom. I'm getting nothing but busy signals and his voice-mail, and I don't know or care what to leave him; and no, I can't be sincere like that... Why fight with him over the phone? He's a thousand miles away; what does he care?"
Every 3rd Sunday of June has felt like this since the years I count my adulthood. Somewhere a man is, far away, avoiding me, because maybe he's out of excuses. All he'll have to repeat to me if he picks up the receiver is: "I'm trying to get back there to see you guys, this place is hell.". I know he'll have a cigarette five minutes after that conversation. I don't know what it is to have a dead father, but I know what it is to feel I have a dead father; that makes things even worse. It's not that he has passed on, and is peering down on me from heaven, it's not even that he's a deadbeat Dad whom I've never felt anything for; It is that he just doesn't care.
I look at the splash of freckles across my face in the mirror, I search the blue puddles of my empty eyes. I know I am more than half my father's boy. I love my mom, but I look nothing like her, save my nose. Her and my brother share similar features though, and that is good. I look just like my father. I fought with him voraciously from the time I could mouth the word: "No", to the point where we were both adults, and we held our tongues only to keep from looking silly. He never abused me, hit me hard, or neglected me, and I don't even think he had that kind of sadistic enthusiasm in him; he was just a devoid shell. Smoking recklessly, faking it to my Mom that he would quit. As I grew older I admired him as my businessman father. He played fair, worked hard, and amazed me with his calm, assertive nature. I liked it how he was bald, and wondered why he kept shampoo around. Always wearing sunglasses, and acting like he was living on the edge.
When I was 14 or so, the man changed. He acted impulsively. He threw house parties while my mom, brother and I were away. He worked outside of work. I started to look at his cell phone lying around like I wanted to smash it. His and my mom's fights were reaching a peak of calamity, threatening to rip our family apart. He was having a mid-life crisis. He bought a motorcycle, and tried to lose 15 years off of his life. I knew at that time how hard it must be to feel... Obsolete. The fighting continued as questions arose about what kind of man he was. Was he fooling around? Life became very scary at that point.
And just as if it had never been there, the fighting stopped. We comfortably moved into the grandest house we'd ever lived in, and awkwardly held out for what would be the last 7 months of our family. The divorce ripped us in half. My mom was devastated, hateful and bitter. Dad seemed to me, unmoved. Why didn't he care, damn it? Where would I end up? Would my mom's sorrow consume her? I started disliking my Mom, because she was the only one around I could blame this wound on.
"No wonder Dad moved out!" I remember screaming at her. I should have gotten smacked for that.
In the following years, the truth of his infidelity bleed out. His new girlfriend was my ideal step-mom, and I loved, and love her. He let me into his house when I would have been homeless otherwise. He pushed me to succeed further than I wanted sometimes. He brought me on amazing adventures, and we were best friends sometimes. But he was not a human to me. He was a gap, a void, a person that I didn't feel loved himself, or me.
"Where are you, Dad?"
You may think I'm selfish, and that I hijacked this article from people who have physically lost their Dads. But I have lost mine utterly, and when I call I wish he wouldn't pick up. I love him, don't get me wrong; but our time is past. I only can have faith that we'll know each other someday.