when I was far too young to understand what the word disappointment meant,
an earthquake shook my house and left a hole in the living room floor shaped like my father
he was a man made of shattered mirrors and kitchen cleavers, only able to bear the sight of his reflection when it was so distorted that he could see his sliced intentions as noble ones
when glass and metal turn to whirlwind tempest
nothing is left without scars
the day I found out he was leaving us, I curled up between my mother's chest and the pinstriped sofa
because even as the hole grew underneath us
she was all I had ever needed to hold onto
when we put a state border between his wreckage and our reconstruction, he still called every night just to hear the sound of my voice
I was six and still loved him
I was seven and blurred his features
I was eight and turned the conversations to clockwork dialogue
I was nine and curled up between my mother's "she's asleep, rob" and the covers under which I was most definitely not asleep
the phone stopped ringing, anyway
when the boy in second grade had the nerve to pursue my attention with phrases unfamiliar on the roof of his mouth, his mother found her own vocabulary with which to define me
I brought his advances on myself because I was a Broken Home Child
mixed-race child
smart but opinionated child
which to county mothers means Broken Child
I was seven years old
my mother and I did not have matching melanin or last names
which is to say
county mothers did not think me hers to claim
I shared a last name with a first name I couldn't always place
with a face I didn't know any more
I am a writer, and it is the only word I have ever despised
when I still thought my mother was larger than life
I would say that divorce was just a word she crushed up in her cereal
I would say that my dad remained a taped-together collage of broken pieces that she was done putting back together
or that she was simply tired of cutting herself on his edges
so when his first phone call on my eleventh birthday sent lightning along our telephone wires, I was forced to see her as she actually was—the most powerful tsunami the ocean had ever felt, magnificent in her rage
she carried with her the waves of a thousand saltwater excuses, and they were spilling over onto the kitchen floor
our house was caving in under a gunpowder gray sky much too thick with tucked away truths as I found out what she had known for years:
my father was a storm we didn't see coming, swept up in a string of lovers I hadn't been privy to
I did not ever imagine a life where my mother would be a woman scorned
I should not ever have had to
when my father didn't look so broken, he combined my mother's Scottish winter with his Texan sun and created something so explosive it could only take human form in me
born in the August heat
a week late
and blinding
he made me into dry brush and summer spark
and when the flames finally caught
he called fire too quickly to realize that every promise he made was just another drop of gasoline in an already far-too-flammable heart
my matchstick tongue grew every bit as combustible as his own; it was only a matter of time and the right gust of wind before I became my own storm, too
it has been almost twenty years, and I am still afraid of becoming my father
hiding him under carefully crafted metaphor does not change the fact that he has never been anything but hollow and vacant and abysmally cold
the kind of shadow who would listen to these words and be flattered that I took the time to write about him at all
he has lain claim on nothing but the hole in our living room floor
and my name.
I will not let him curse that, too
my name will not be a swear word on my own tongue.
