I'm sorry. I've been staring at this paper for quite some time now and still I'm sorry is all I can manage to write. I've been swallowing apologies for months and popping sorrys like pills and still the words will fall out of my mouth whenever I remember the look on your face as I left. I want to tell every single psychologist alive that no number of family dinners will help you survive the falling out brought about by boys and high school and secret cigarettes and no matter how many times you hugged her it will never feel like enough because we haven't spoken in years and no by spoken I do not mean empty words spilling out of tired mouths and lonley lips across plates of food and phones smarter than we were because at least they knew the true value of connection. and do you know I've saved every single ******* birthday card because these words you didn't even have the nerve to write yourself are the most genuine I've never heard you say and the fact that love replaces from or sincerely at the bottom of the page instills the slightest bit of hope in me that maybe eventually I'll actually hear you say it to my face before the day our fingers are laced across your deathbed. and dad I'm sorry that this ******* poetry is the only way I've ever known how to say anything worth listening to but god I love you and I wish I could sew us back together but the distance between us is one no amount of stitches could fix. I wish Hallmark went out of business and telephones didn't exist that way I could hear you say that you love me before the words go extinct on your tongue and stale between your teeth. but all you've left me with are twelve years worth of birthday cards stuffed between my bedsheets and the audacity to sign your name on someone else's four dollar fifty cent masterpiece.