It's not hatred, again not the right word, but a profound revulsion and resentment. Just leave me alone, the fuck alone. Forget that I exist, please. I wish you well, really I do, but it's a passive wish, that I want no part in. Go, and be well. But go. Do I need now to be the object of his obsessive fantasies?
I just can't forget, events or their concomitant emotions. Sorry. I think of something, or it arises spontaneously, present like a sudden monster, and I have to live it again, frisson and shiver. I don't like being this way, but it is what it is. So I think how I was driven from his house as a teenager, I return from school to find my things actually thrown out onto the yard, or notes on tables saying Get the fuck out of my house, and I am dismayed that now, albeit 35 years later, he claims to want contact with me. I mean what I say. Didn't he? Sadly, he did. So he must be lying now.
I got another letter from him, what, Friday. I haven't actually read it yet. Launched myself into a rage upon see it. Opened it, skimmed it, more of the same shit. Shit shit shit. He speaks of his pain and his tears and his prayers, begging for forgiveness. See? Everyone else is the bad guy, so unforgiving. If only we would forgive him, he'd be happy. I, confined as I am to reality and logic, observe that regardless of my hard heart, which has power to harm only myself, he is responsible for his emotional state. Forgiveness, as every adolescent must eventually come to puzzle out, depends on repentance. Change, and feel forgiven.
My father is not capable of change. Neither am I. I'm okay with this fact, about myself. As long as I'm left alone, that is. I don't expect to be happy. I don't expect my solitude to end. I am fragile and filled with rage, but I seem to have struck an equilibrium, and I don't want any more poison spit into my eye.
He wrote a book last year, a page of which he sent me. Understandable. We want to be known. Maybe I'll take a picture of it and post it here. You know, so I can be known. He's entitled his book something like Confessions of a Schizophrenic. I suppose I'll have to reply to his letter. Do you think it would be cruel of me to correct his title? Because to be accurate it should be "Confessions of a Narcissist". "Confessions of a Borderline Personality Narcissist" lacks zip -- isn't really marketable. But it just goes to show -- why would he think anyone would want to be around, as he has it, a schizophrenic? Sort of makes one wonder if he's sincere -- if his apparent self-awareness isn't just another manipulation.
Like that father years ago who set his small son on fire in a motel room. After prison, or from it, he wanted some sort of contact with the victim -- I'm so very sorry. But crimes that merit death short-circuit claims to parental rights, to any moral or biological or humane claim on a right to contact. Regardless of the reason or method, ties can be severed, relationships can be killed.
I myself am laden, for my weakness, with the archetypal baggage that allows him to have power over me, but I can still smell the stink of burning flesh, and it nauseates me. Because I am a fool, bound to duty if incapable of heroism in this travesty, I will go through the motions like a backyard zombie, awaiting the inevitable castration, invalidation, that sick parents reflexively work on their offspring of any age.
Should I be ashamed of these truths? I got a pleading, begging really, note from my mother, eloquent in its way, that I crumpled up and threw away, saying I should forgive, and have compassion, he is alone. My response is rage. Do I have to move out of the state, to get away from these people?
J
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