AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Nightmares are even harder to stop, did you know that?
Of course you did. After all, you were one. My own personal nightmare.
You ever only get one father, after all, don’t you? That’s what they say, at least. Well, I got you. And even if you ended up being the monster under the bed rather than the father one comes home to, you were all I had for a very long time.
I wrote my first poems for you, did you know that?
They got rewards, too.
You’d be proud.
You’d hate them. The poems (and the rewards). But let’s be real, none of that would exist, not the poems or their rewards, if things were still as they were.
If you hadn’t done what you did.
So I suppose I have you to thank for being a poet.
I have you to thank for meeting Isaiah four years ago.
I have you to thank for losing him as well.
I have you to thank for the painful, hateful looks he keeps sending my way. Even worse, I have you to thank for the looks he doesn’t send my way. Most of the time he ignores me.
You’re the only one I can talk to about him—you’re the only one who knows about us. Well, knew. My sisters have no idea, and I can’t bring myself to tell them yet. It will just make it too real, you know? But you know all about us. How I was secretly seeing him for two years before you found out.
How you destroyed us.
Now, I found him again. How you would hate that… Anyway, I went to his show and everything. I nearly died.
That day at the concert, when I saw his eyes find me in the crowd and immediately go hard and black? That day the pain was so great, I nearly died. But now that he’s ignoring me, it’s even worse. It doesn’t kill me, this pain of his indifference. It makes mewishit would kill me instead. Because he and I, we’re nothing now. We’re not friends and we’re not enemies. I had hoped, when I first got on this boat, that he would hate me. But he got over his feelings pretty quickly and now he’s just polite and cold.
He’s nothing to me now and I’m nothing to him.
And I have you to thank for that as well.
We were sitting side by side today at the piano and I wanted to die. I almost did die. I went to my room afterwards and I almost had a panic attack, but one of his friends, Jude, was there, and he helped me calm down. So I didn’t have the panic attack, but instead I cried myself to sleep.
Because he doesn’t want me.
He’s polite, not even angry any more.
He’s so polite, I thought I would die right there and then.
I thought at least he would be mad at me for what we did to him back then–that would mean that he cared, even a little. That he cared enough to hate me.
But he doesn’t. He’s moved on. He could care less if I lived or died or sat there on that piano making words with him. It’s all the same to him.
I could pretend that what happened was my fault too, and that if I apologized for my part in this, everything would be ok. Except I did apologize, and it changed nothing. And also except: it’s not my fault too.
It’s nobody’s fault but yours.
It’s you. It’s all you.
And now you’re gone and you’ve left me alone and broken in a world where you don’t exist and never did. I spent my girlhood loving a dad that I had created all in my head, in my imagination. A dad that didn’t exist.
You were never my father.
You were never you.
