Dear Father
Dear Father
(if that title ever belonged to you)
You were never a man.
You were an absence with a name.
You married a woman you did not protect,
broke her until survival looked like escape,
then watched her walk into the dark
with a baby in her arms
and called it not your problem.
You left us to hunger.
To beg.
To sleep wherever mercy failed last.
I watched other children stand tall
on shoulders you built for them,
while I learned early
how to fold myself smaller
so I would not be noticed,
so I would not be rejected again.
Your other children carry your surname like Armor.
I carry it like a wound.
When you died, nothing in me collapsed
because nothing was ever built.
No bedtime stories.
No hands to pull me back from danger.
No voice saying you are safe now.
Just silence.
Long.
Loud.
Cruel.
And yes
I blame you.
I blame you for the nights
my mother lied to my face with a smile
while terror shook her from the inside.
For the streets of Malvern at
2 a.m.,
where a woman and her child learned
how invisible desperation can be.
I blame you for the doors that closed
because we were poor,
because we were mixed,
because we were inconvenient.
You knew she was weak.
You knew she could not fight the world alone.
You knew what would happen to us
and still you chose comfort
over responsibility,
over blood,
over me.
I became a burden before I became a child.
Shelter came with conditions.
Silence came with survival.
And I learned that pain is something
you swallow whole
when speaking would cost you the ground beneath your feet.
You were supposed to be my roots.
Instead, I grew in cracks.
Bent.
Bruised.
Trampled.
People ask why I lack confidence.
How do you stand tall
when no one ever taught you
you had the right to exist?
I was never your angel.
I was never anyone’s priority.
I was just the consequence
of a man who walked away.
So don’t ask me to mourn you.
Don’t ask me to forgive you.
You died a stranger
who shaped my suffering from afar.
You were my father only in biology
never in love,
never in protection,
never in presence.
And if hell exists,
know this:
I survived you.
And you will never be able to say the same
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