He asked me for my forgiveness, and I told him he has it. When I was 12 he asked me for my friendship, and I told him it was his. I didn't understand at that time that I was a maverick, nor did I understand that a parent should be more than just friends with their kids. It was another copout. Another way for him to escape the mistakes that his ***** compelled him to make. Thoughts from his smaller head became a disease, murdering the instincts of his larger. One that destroyed his mind and made fair to dawn unto him the status of brain dead. In my childish state I accepted this, not knowing I would have to mature on my own, neglecting the advice of my mother because it came in an aggressive tone, neither understanding that it was my new friends fault that the women I loved and my sole protector was tarnished, dented, and mocked. Used as a semi-sentimental locket, only to be pulled out and loved when he didn't feel love himself. Now I'm 20 years old and he's still in my life. You would think I would have made him take the immediate stage right when he told me he was having another child. No, it was not with my mother. He had lost his locket years prior allowing me to stumble upon it and realize it was never his in the first place. Rather it was mine to protect and polish. This new child was still family though, the blood that races through me and the features of my father that I wish weren't to be were also to be in him. I needed to act. In the years to come I realized it may not have all been my fathers fault. He knew not his father and was forced to live life stumbling around as a lost soul in the misty haze of confusion. Sort of like me but neglected to a further degree. So I took the responsibility to help father this fatherless father in hopes that one day he may become the father I knew he could be. So my brother could have a father instead of a friend and my friend could have a family instead photographs of faces he'd once seen, that only reminded him of the resentment and angst that he'd caused in the souls of those wandering with him in the misty haze of confusion.