i tell myself
i don’t care that
it’s been two years
since the last time
i saw my father

i tell myself
i don’t care that
he wasn’t even really
in my life until i was 7
and before that i just told
people i didn’t have
a father

i tell myself
i don’t care that
my father hates me

but i’m crying like
my dog just died
so it’s not very convincing

and i can pinpoint when
he stopped loving me
later on in my life
than i've thought for years

but can you really blame me
when he’s not around to ask?

and it’s this book he gave me
a memoir
the summer before i started
my freshman year of high school
where he called me his darling
and signed it “love, pops”

i read that book
last week
cried my way through
almost the whole thing
holding the bent pages and
cracked spine like i wanted
him to hold my hand again

but i did something
when i was growing up
to make him stop loving me
and for years i thought that
if i just went deep enough
i could dig it out
but that thing goes
deeper than my bone marrow

and he’s not around to ask
and i’m crying like an idiot
over this man that
probably won’t even know what
i look like
in 5 years or 10

and i have so many things
to ask him
to say to him
like why he didn’t want to be my father
why he wasn’t proud of me
why he doesn’t love my anymore

how i feel like it’s all my fault
and he probably agrees with me
and that might have made me
resent him
maybe even hate him
a year or two ago
but tonight
it just makes me cry
harder