245/365 – WHO I WAS, WHO I AM

Word Count: 349

I was just fifteen, I was thirty. My mother had died and my dad replaced her with drink. I lost being a daughter, was just short of being a wife. It was not a good time in my life.

It’s hard to walk in the footprints you’ve left behind. Something inside always made you believe they’d been swept away by the wind. Made you want to believe, gave you hope.

Now I really am thirty and my father has died. I must go back and bury him.

I have a new life, a new name, a new family, and yet I must become once again who I was. That girl who almost never broke free. I got through high school and the community college and a job that I hated but it paid the bills when my father was laid off. For a while he collected. Then he did odd jobs for cash. The cash I never did see. When he got sick someone realized that I couldn’t stay home and take care of him. I turned his care over to the state, feeling guilty for the real relief I felt. The house was blessedly quiet and clean. I visited him on the weekends, then once a month. It became holidays only, Christmas, and out of some sense of duty, Father’s Day. The last time he didn’t know who I was.

I went alone, my husband had met him just once and my children never. For his sake as much as theirs. Without booze his bitterness had turned into anger. He never let go of the belief he’d been cheated in life. I was not enough to make up for the loss.

He looked incredibly small. Decades compressed on his face, his worn body, decades that impressed in just a few years. I was surprised to feel tears. I was surprised that I held his hand for a moment, that I kissed his forehead, that I felt a hole hollow out in my heart.

But I wasn’t surprised that as I left to travel back home, I wore wings.