Tag: loss

Tell us about the experience of being outside, looking in — however you’d like to interpret that.

Photographers, artists, poets: show us OUTSIDE.

The thing about Daily Prompts that I discovered last year, is that they often feel like a knife that’s set to slice open one layer of me at a time.  Sometimes it comes out in poetry, like nonets, that don’t seem to say much because they’re meant to cover up more than they’re meant to reveal, and sometimes they’re prose, like this one, that’s meant to slice open an artery that’s been clogged up for so long with junk from the past, and left to bleed out till there’s nothing left.

When my father died last year, it was a quiet affair.  None of us went home to bury him, and though we weren’t there for the hasty memorial set up by his estranged second wife, we accidentally witnessed the filming of his body being pushed into the crematory oven, because someone posted it on Facebook without any privacy settings set up.

And through that glass that separated the crematory attendants from the friends and family I barely knew, I realized just what an outsider I was in my father’s life. An outsider when he was alive, and an outsider when he was dead.

I was always considered his favorite because I was the only girl, and they said he doted on me.  And maybe he did.  But when I was five, my parents separated and after that, I only saw him for one or two days at a time every Christmas and the two summers we spent with him and my stepmother.  He was always the busy businessman, taking care of everyone who came to him for help, giving them jobs, and money for food, and paying for their children’s education.  I adored him, and I loved him more than anything.

Then one day when I was about ten or eleven, I heard one of my friends talking about her father.  She talked about the piggy back rides he gave her, the hugs, the kisses – the constant presence of a father in a girl’s life.  But what stood out to me that day were those three words:  piggy back rides.

At that time, a father to me was a man who lived too far away, whose telegrams told me, ‘Wishing I was there for your birthday STOP love Daddy STOP,’ and whose voice I often swore I heard coming from the other side of the confessional box at the church – and the only reason I’d actually go to confession.  He was the man who handed out five crisp one-hundred peso bills when a hundred would have done nicely to a child, and whose visits later on would signal to friends that we were all about to have a grand time.

But piggy back rides….damn.

There were none of those things in my life then, and none to come.  But it represented the father who was never there,  one whom I believed should have been there for me when I needed someone to talk to, or someone to tell me that he still loved me, regardless of what I believed I must have done to cause his and my mother’s separation, and many other ills that often beset a young girl going through puberty surrounded by pedophiles masked as father figures so eager to listen because they know that no one is listening.  I know it’s a harsh thing to say, but this is what comes out of me, when unfiltered by false poetry.

So when the memorial was held, I saw one or two pictures that flashed onto the screen and none of them, I remember now, were of anything familiar to us.  There were children there, yes – but none of them were of us.  Or even of me, his favorite.

So even in death, I was still outside looking in, a daughter seeking for her father within.

Daily Prompt