Fogbound

The day we laid that cold crust of earth over your body, something in me went missing. I watched the people crying around the grave and couldn’t understand why they mourned someone they saw perhaps once a year. Then I looked at my mother. Silent, glittering in her overdressed elegance, as if she wanted you to envy her for still being alive. Perhaps it was her revenge for all those years spent chasing your approval and failing. After she divorced you, she drifted away from me too. I only wish it had happened sooner; her presence or absence never changed much.

Back home, the smell of grass and that fog-soaked cemetery settled in my mind. Objects lost themselves in that inner fog. I hunted for keys already in my pocket. In the narrow hallway between our two rooms, tasks slipped from my memory, and every cup of coffee went cold. Food tasted dull. I checked the stove, the doors, the water taps over and over. I fought life so hard that numbness wrapped itself around me. I went to bed exhausted and woke even more worn, my body nothing but bruised fatigue.

When the routine finally defeated me, the real battle began: the one inside. First came denial, the refusal to admit the weight of your absence. Then collapse. I cried, but the wound in my soul stayed hollow. And so, I began to write. The very work you never wanted for me. Not for you, who are gone and will remain gone, but for the version of you still living inside me.

I built stories about you, replayed memories. Then I realized the one inside me was not you at all. He was the father I had wanted. His face resembled yours through a softening veil of mist, but he was kind. He didn’t wait for me to fail. He didn’t frown or correct or sigh in disappointment. His small, cutting smiles were gone. I found memories that had never existed. In one, I had made a mistake, and the imagined you placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. You consoled me. Praised me. Forgave me. Touched me with a tenderness I had never known. Father.

Then, as if waking abruptly, another battle began.
The first fight was with you. I pictured your aged body in the garden, the small red trowel in your hand. I sat you across from me on a chair, just as you used to sit in silence tending your flowers. No words, no criticism, no energy for long arguments.

I asked the image of you whether you had ever loved me. I cast you as guilty, myself as righteous. Your head was bowed while I hurled my anger and sorrow at your face. Why had you never praised me, even when I was promoted in the job you had insisted, I pursue? I showed you every wound. The day you left home. My mother clutching the phone, crying as she whispered about your selfishness. Her words sank into me, the same way they had sunk into her years before. And the night someone burned all my childhood photos. I always thought it was you. But no. It was her.

I stared at the cup of cold coffee in my shaking hand. My dry mouth. My reflection glaring back at me from the porcelain. That face was terrifyingly familiar. Yours. You had lived inside me all along. Fear seized the cup and shattered it against the floor. For a moment, time perched on the broken shards. The sound cracked something in me. Shame replaced anger. I felt a sudden tenderness for the old, silent man in my memories. He wasn’t the one who had hurt me. The face that had wounded me was right there in the fragments: the knotted brows, the thin white strands at the temples, that smug, dismissive curl of the lips. It was me. I was you, and you were the small boy who kept his eyes on the ground.

When I could breathe again, the second battle began. The one with myself. Had I ever loved you? Ever understood you? Had I ever been brave enough to ask to be touched, even once?

There was only one way to find an answer. I went through the old photo albums, damp with the smell of mold. Each page a tether to the past. My ninth birthday: my mother cooking your favorite dish, not mine. I still don’t know whether she feared you or wanted to force her way into your heart. My graduation photos from the field you had chosen for me. The New Year’s pictures smiling over a buried argument.

Anger. Then grief. Then contempt. Then something softer. Until I reached thirty-five years back. The winter day I slipped on the ice. My cheeks numb, my hands cracked and burning from the cold. You lifted me up, brushed me off. I searched your eyes for disapproval. Instead, you knelt so I could climb onto your back. I still feel the warmth of your shoulders on my frozen skin. You put a bandage on my scraped palms. You told me growing up always hurts.

I framed that photo of my bandaged hand and placed it where the missing piece of me used to be. The hollow in my chest began to fill, building a fragile bridge of memories and faint smiles. I turned the pages again and looked at the child in those pictures. Why had I never seen all those small smiles before?

Father, I wish you could have freed yourself from the stern man you had chained yourself to.