Kintsugi
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My father decided, somehow, maybe three years ago or more that he “wanted a relationship” with me, which was, to me, abrupt and which he pursued with sudden... aggression is my word. Zeal, maybe.
It was something I knew I could not give him. Something I had already long wrestled with and fairly gave up on. I knew he could die soon. My parents are a great deal older than most of my peers’. Adoption is a bizarre thing. Transposition of life. Crossing through universes. No one asks the infant’s opinion, and when they grow into a person, they don’t want to know.
I felt he could die more peacefully with me at a distance. To have a relationship would have meant his walking through the fire of my rage. Observing the hell he threw me into by choosing the path of least resistance—harboring my brother in his home when I walked away, at seventeen, and then through all those years I when I scraped and scrounged and suffered knowing I had nowhere else to go.
This will take me a long time to write. But I needed to begin. This death of the living is a living grief that will never itself die. It is the most unkind death I have known. It’s a chosen death, but it’s worse than suicide, for The Living Dead just keep on choosing it every moment of every day and still don’t have the decency to actually die. Going no contact with someone who is poison is the best option, but it’s a shit one.
Yesterday I thought about the phrase “between the Devil and the deep blue sea.” When faced with a devil, who wouldn’t choose to swim?
It was something I knew I could not give him. Something I had already long wrestled with and fairly gave up on. I knew he could die soon. My parents are a great deal older than most of my peers’. Adoption is a bizarre thing. Transposition of life. Crossing through universes. No one asks the infant’s opinion, and when they grow into a person, they don’t want to know.
I felt he could die more peacefully with me at a distance. To have a relationship would have meant his walking through the fire of my rage. Observing the hell he threw me into by choosing the path of least resistance—harboring my brother in his home when I walked away, at seventeen, and then through all those years I when I scraped and scrounged and suffered knowing I had nowhere else to go.
This will take me a long time to write. But I needed to begin. This death of the living is a living grief that will never itself die. It is the most unkind death I have known. It’s a chosen death, but it’s worse than suicide, for The Living Dead just keep on choosing it every moment of every day and still don’t have the decency to actually die. Going no contact with someone who is poison is the best option, but it’s a shit one.
Yesterday I thought about the phrase “between the Devil and the deep blue sea.” When faced with a devil, who wouldn’t choose to swim?