when your past catches up to you

I haven’t spoken or seen my father in several years now and the few times I’ve happened to mention that to people their reaction is always one of two things… quiet judgment or complete incomprehension.

I stopped chasing after him a long time ago, even before our current silent standoff. I was trying to take a nap earlier and I just couldn’t stop thinking about him. I rarely think about him anymore. As I was tossing and turning trying to shake him from my thoughts, I decided to stop fighting it... I went where my mind wanted to go and started reliving something I haven’t allowed myself to think about since I was 14.

What most people don’t know is that the summer between 8th grade and my freshman year of high school, I decided I couldn’t live in my mother’s house anymore, although that’s an entirely different story. I looked to my father to save me, which perhaps is somewhat unfair since he’s never really been a major figure in my life. It would be like asking the man you buy your morning coffee from to reach out and pull you out of a world filled with alcoholism, fighting, depression and chaos. I suppose it wasn’t fair but I asked nonetheless.

I’ve always had this secret love affair with writing. I had grown used to living in a world where no one ever asked me what I thought or cared about, but I deep down I was praying that for once someone would look to me and say, “so what do you think?” Writing for me was more than a hobby or bad teenage poetry. I felt that by writing I could somehow feel even just a minor sense of importance. I wanted to believe that my thoughts somehow mattered, even if no one ever read them.

A few weeks after I moved across the country from New York to Texas, a major part of me died and I can still feel the effects of it now. People have told me that I have a wall… that I’m difficult to get to know and although it isn’t intentional, I really believe this is why…

I had just started my freshman year of high school and returned to my father’s house after a day at school. I was greeted by both my step-mother and my father with a stack of photocopied pages from a journal I had kept stashed away in the far corner of a closet in the room I was staying in.

That same afternoon I was immediately taken to see Gene, a therapist they both shared. They bombarded him with the photocopied pages from my journal and attacked every sentence I wrote. This type of reaction is something you would expect from the sudden exposure of international conspiracies or a confession from Mother Theresa that all along she was really a brothel owner pimping out young children around the world.

During this deeply humiliating moment, I was the only one in the room who was silent and Gene finally asked them to leave. He only asked me one question while they were gone. He turned to me and said, “Doesn’t this upset you?”

The truth was my father had stripped me of the one thing that ever mattered to me and I felt completely violated and raw… The truth was I wanted to scream but no longer had a voice.

About a week later I returned to New York and my father quickly turned the room I had occupied into an office.

I didn’t write again after that for 4 years.

In 3 weeks my father comes to Chicago for a conference, which is probably the only reason I’m even thinking about this.