bio dad

 “You feel victimized?”

He looks at me with pity. Patronizing. As though feeling victimized was just the saddest thing I could be, having been abandoned by my biological father at three. His empty face giving me judgement instead of remorse. Never mind the world I have created for myself. Never mind the beauty and love I put into this place. I have woven a network of friendship and connection, something this man will never have. I have built a palace of hope and possibility compared to the shanty of a life he lives in: sick and alone. He fuels himself with delusions; Reality twisted and fragmented into his mosaic of truth, caulked together by the lies his mind tells him. 

Somewhere out of the insanity, he does speak words of kindness: they are laced in pretention, as though he’s gifting me approval. The audacity he wears to even think I need that from him. This is the trouble with frank; his half truths, one image drawn over another so intricately that the two become one. In the same breath, he compliments me and on exhale says his very words have changed the world. He thinks he can walk around in other people’s rooms, see into their lives, and read their minds. I will myself not to ask what he sees in mine just as strongly as I close my lips and swallow words of accusation or argument. There’s no point. 

He is happy he says, alone with his books and god. He prefers it that way. People are too complicated. So I note to myself, I will not hold onto guilt if I don’t come again.