12/30/2010

Immersed, saturated, weighed down by this trip home. Entry into a strange new realm and I am birthed into it all an alien creature. New sights, sounds, feelings. New relationships. New schemas. None of my old language is spoken here anymore. Repair with my father. Feels as though I dreamed it. Another heady fever dream. But it wasn’t. He was in my room, awkwardly holding the door handle as he cried, weezed uncomfortable from the intimacy and vulnerability of the conversation. I screamed. We both cried. I got it all out. All of it. The offenses carried out against an innocent child. The pain caused, therapy engaged in because of it all. All of it. Laid it out. He did too. How he is alone in the world, wanted to die when my mom was deployed. His faulty family, how he never learned to be a parent. Oddly I was most comforted by his admission that he was "an awful father." Strange and dynamic moment. More human than ever, both of us. He hugged me, said he loved me. He’s never told me he loved me. I saw myself in the mirror, mouth agape, unable to find any words at all or feelings. Strange connections being forged. He held me like a precious thing he thought he had killed and buried. Promised me things wouldn’t go back to the way they were. I crept down onto the floor afterward and hid behind my bed. Opened the shade and saw a new universe, aptly covered in snow, pure, new. A new small being afraid to go into it. A cinder block of pain dislodged from my soul, everything appeared different. I feel strange now with my new arms and legs, wobbly, unsure. The ways we interacted by default no longer apply. I see the restraint when he talks to me, the great effort with which it all occurs. The great effort with which being a father occurs. I hope it will get easier. I hope we can rebuild. Years of trauma and damage acknowledged does not negate them or repair a bond we had 25 years ago. I wish I could put the sight and feeling of it all into adequate words. I wish I had that talent. It was beyond anything i have ever experienced. I think I could paint it, but I can’t write it. I’m fearful of this new land we are now navigating together but I feel certain it is a far better thing than the hollows of our previous existence.