Closet

grieving the loss of a father who still lives

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This newsletter rests at the intersection of the unserious ramblings of a woman full of buttered rice and dad jokes and the somewhat sophisticated stories and essays of someone who knows just enough “smart” words to sound super intelligent and insightful.

What will today’s newsletter be? Hmm…

this closet hold everythin’ but clothes
          shoeboxes filled with tear-stained letters to a father who gifted me his eyes but not his presence
          torn yellow pages from stolen phone books from neighbors’ front lawns
a dusty album that smells of regret anger and a tortured heart/full of faded polaroids of           a man/whose blood pours from cuts i give myself/using broken pens to write tear-stained letters to mail to every man whose name is his/that i found within the torn yellow pages from my neighbors’ phone books/“hi, you don’t know me/but

                                                               i might be your daughter”

the album, a gift from my grandmother


       but not my mother


“maybe one day you will want to know him…”

                                                                                                   but she didn’t tell me the child 

                                                                                                             shouldn’t seek the father 
       how does he not feel the hole left in the absence of kinship with his seed


maybe it only goes one way though 
i’m see through 
he’s whole 
he’s moved on and 
i’m…



sitting on battered floor pillow i punch into the corner so that when i sit with my back between the walls it hugs me as my father should



but never did

It always rained on these mornings. I think it might have been God’s way of telling me He disapproved of what I was about to do. If He wanted me to change my mind, He should have brought the storm. He should have brought thunderous claps that pushed me back to my room and into my bed. He should have snatched the rising sun and covered the sky in a blanket of thick clouds and sent lightning as a reminder that He can create light when He wants…but you, you will sit in the dark. He should have sent some of His best work. A warning shot. A “come outside at your own peril.” But He didn’t. Instead, I got a flurry of rain pattered against my window. I got rain with a discernible stopping point. I got rain that gave me enough time to eat a bowl of confidence alongside my cereal.

And I did just that.

I stuffed a handful of Raisin Bran in my mouth and then poured some into the bowl to pick out some raisins to pop into my already full mouth. They never put enough raisins in here. I hop on one leg trying to jam the other into a pair of jeans and almost choke on Raisin Bran I should have waited until it at least ran past my throat and settled into my stomach. But I was in a rush. What I was about to do needed to be done under the coverage of a dawning sun. Light enough to see where I am going and dark enough for others to not see what I am doing. Or dark enough to still be in their own beds. I throw a dark shirt over my head and finish the look with some mismatched sneakers because I can’t be bothered to find a matching pair. Time is not a friend right now and that bowl of confidence has a way too short shelf life.

Now, I am ready.

I grab whatever coat is in the closet to shield myself from the rain and I make my way out the front door. I stop at the edge of our driveway, and I look up and down our street. Several yards hold just what I am looking for and I choose the house that best suits a quick getaway. This time, it was the house right next door. Last time, the one across the street. I stare at it for a bit and then I look into the windows of my neighbor’s house. No lights are on. I imagine them to still be sleeping in their beds or enjoying this rainy morning with a bowl of hot grits and bacon, curled up watching tv. I’m hoping they are knocked out sleep though. Ain’t no way I am going to just walk over there without checking the other houses as well.

I know I should have just ran, grabbed what I was after, and ran back into my house…but when you ain’t doing right, you always looking for something to go wrong. Something to just screw up what I was doing. A neighbor taking their dog for an early walk, someone leaving to go to work, or the Schwann’s truck making a delivery. Paranoia can be a friend or a nuisance when you ain’t supposed to be doing what you doing.

I was taking too long though.

My glasses were coated in raindrops making it difficult to see, my arms were tired from holding that coat over my head, and the sun was actually having the audacity to do what it does every morning, rise. It was time for me to do what I came out here to do.

Take the neighbor’s phone book.

They used to deliver the phonebooks to our homes back then. Just throw them in our front lawns like they did the newspapers. And I needed another one. The ones they offered at convenience and grocery stores only had business listings and items for sale. I needed one that held residential information. Those are the ones they dropped off at our homes. I really needed to get over there and grab that phonebook. After taking a deep breath that drew in way too much rain, I ran over to their yard. I didn’t take one last look to see if the coast was clear. I didn’t wipe my glasses off. I let the coat fall to my shoulders. I just ran over there like Michael Johnson but less like a duck and more like…it wasn’t pretty. I snatched that phonebook from their yard and it slipped from my hands. At that time, I saw the headlights of a car turning down the street and I just froze.

This is it.

This is the moment they arrest me and haul me to the jail where they take 10–12-year-old kids. Wherever that is. You couldn’t tell my 10 years, almost 11-year-old self that this car wasn’t coming for me. Youth, mixed with wrongdoing, mixed with paranoia because of said wrongdoing…recipe for a disaster of the mind and therefore limbs. I lost that phonebook to the grass and gravity wanted to get a few licks in. I fell right on top of that phonebook and that car pulled into a driveway way up the street. They couldn’t even see me. I know that now, but then…nah. As far as I was concerned, they saw the culprit lay down in surrender and they didn’t have to come any further down the street. Their work was done. 10-year-old, almost 11-year-old me, just knew that they were there to see what I was doing.

I grunted in pain as I rolled off that phonebook. I am wetter than wet, my back throbs, and the phonebook slipped out of the plastic sleeve that protected it from the rain. Now, it’s wet and the cover is starting to warp. I need to get inside now. I grabbed the wet book and walked towards the house. The sun was higher in the sky, and I could see more of the ground. I stopped in the middle of our yard and picked up our own phonebook and limped back inside. I know, you’re wondering why would you take your neighbor’s book when you have your own? This is true. All the houses in the neighborhood got phonebooks but I needed to rip some pages out. I needed to mark one up. I needed to add it to the collection of other phonebooks and make comparisons. I couldn’t do that with the family phonebook. My mama would soon catch on to what I was trying to do, and I didn’t know how she would react. So, I needed my own separate phone book. And I was too afraid to ask my mama to call whoever you are to call when you need an extra phonebook. This would lead to questions I wasn’t prepared to answer.

I placed ours on the living room table and took my stolen phonebook straight to my room and placed it on my bed. I peeled those wet clothes off and dried myself off. I scrubbed myself raw with that towel. I think I was punishing myself for doing what I just did. What I have done for the last couple of years. There hasn’t been a “phonebook theft day” that went well. Something always happened.

I grabbed some fresh dry clothes to put on and I dried off the phonebook with a blow dryer. In my closet, I didn’t really keep clothes there. It was a tiny box of a space, and it held stacks of shoeboxes on its single full of phonebook, phonebooks pages, letters, journals, and stamps. I kept a large red worn out photo album in there under a pile of blankets I had on the floor with a pillow I used to sit on when I wanted to hide myself away in there.

This photo album was a gift from my grandma. My mama would not have ever given it to me, I don’t think. It came from her house. I found it one day when I was looking through all the albums she kept in one of her cabinets. I flipped through it and on the first page of the album was a page full of pics of my mama and another man. She was young and she looked happy. So did this man. I couldn’t really make out his features at the time, but I wasn’t really focused too much on him. Big Mama come in the room, and I ask her who this man is. She tell me, “That’s Vernon.” She pauses for such a long time. And then she says, “he’s your father.”

He’s my father.

I can’t even register that.

I couldn’t at the time. It didn’t make sense to me. I mean, I knew my father was out there, but I didn’t know where. And I didn’t think about him too much, or at all really. Not until that day. Until that day, I felt the loneliness that not having a father brought. I felt the pain of it. But I didn’t have a face to it. I didn’t have a name. I didn’t have one story. I didn’t have anything that would attach me to him. So, I had this hole in me, and it hurt. But it didn’t hurt as much as it did when I knew his face, I knew his name, and Big Mama told me a story.

She knew where he was the whole time. Only I didn’t know this until I was a little older. I wish she would have told me instead of waiting until I was about to have major back surgery to inform me that he and his family had written me letters only because she told them where I was. If she would have told me she knew where he was when she told me who he was, I wouldn’t have broken my own heart a thousand times with each letter I wrote to a stranger who had the same name as him in whatever phonebook I could get my hands on. I wouldn’t have had to sneak to buy stamps and envelopes with whatever money I could find or earn from doing work at my Mamaw’s and Papaw’s house. I wouldn’t have sent tear-stained letters to stranger’s homes, possibly disrupting their dinner tables with claims of another child.

I don’t blame her. I don’t know that she was supposed to tell me who that man was in that album in the first place. My mama didn’t talk much about him after her mama told her that she told me who he was. She didn’t talk about him until after I met him. Until after he and his family sent me letters.

And I had to find out for myself why that was. I had to learn who he was for myself.

I am his child.

Sandwiched between his other children.

I worried and cried long nights about breaking homes with my letters I sent when I was younger.

And he broke his own home when he had me. And hurt my mama.

I spent time trying to make an imaginary relationship work with a man who couldn’t be bothered to love me in the way I deserved.

I carry his face.

I see him when I look in a mirror and I hate that. I don’t like mirrors much to this day. I take the selfies, I look at myself in a mirror when getting ready but my gaze doesn’t hold long. Long stares at myself in mirrors or photos, I don’t do. I have his eyes. This nose isn’t really my mama’s. One could argue it’s my Big Mama’s and trust me, I try to make that argument all day. But I know that if all I see is my mama’s side of the family, I can find so many branches of that tree that this face comes from. And I also know that if someone took one look at that man who is responsible for my being here, my face is in his. They will know me as that man’s child.

And I hate that with every part of who I am.

I didn’t even know if I should have written this, but I am trying to heal every part of who I am. I am trying to forgive myself for taking on the hurt I felt at the hands of another. When I wrote that poem, I didn’t know what I was looking for when I did. It started with a prompt of “a lost connection.” Thing is, I don’t know how I thought of him as a lost connection, because I don’t know if what we actually had was a connection when I finally met him. If it was, it wasn’t strong enough to keep him from abandoning me again. I know, I know I am mature enough to know that it isn’t my fault, but emotionally, these damn emotions do what they want sometimes. And they will have me thinking that maybe if I was better. Maybe if I did this in a different way. Maybe if I was more like this. Perhaps if I made more of an effort to connect when we did meet each other.

But it wasn’t my fault. I was a child. And to him, when it comes to him…I am still the child. I can’t see how a life giver could be so cruel to their seed. How do you not want to cover your child in all that you are and all that you have. Instead, you leave broken homes and even broker children who have to carry reminders of one of the greatest pains they have ever known, during the years they are supposed to be the most protected, in their name, in their face, in their mannerisms, in their walk, in their talk…

They leave their mark but not their presence.

And we carry that pain for a lifetime.