There is something that was ruined in him that was not ruined in me, and I know this as fate or fortune for there is nothing higher in me than in him. If you can't see yourself in the deepest horror and the greatest splendour of the world then you do not yet know it.
This man, my father. I saw the whites of his eyes disappear when it happened, the pupils spilled black ink, and there was no love left, and he was a vengeful God and what we had done we did not know. God had PTSD and he mistook a party balloon for gunfire and a child of six for an enemy soldier.
When he was not destroying the world, he pretended to love it, so drama was sold as a kind of love, and we had to believe it, had to keep faith. We sat as spectators, and we watched a false prophet, a man pretending to love his children and we acclaimed him, and we never spoke of that fourth wall, of the great bastion of deceit between us which even now lies unbroken as a one-way mirror. And I cannot speak to it. I cannot speak to the lonesome man behind the glass who does not know that he is known. He will not hear it. All I can do is watch him wanting to love so badly he pretends it is so.
Generation after generation teaching the demonstration of love like some ancient tale recited by a bard, some vestige of forgotten knowledge. We hold the shape of it, but we can't seem to reverse engineer it to know how it was built. And it ends with me because I do not know true love and I will be the first to say it.
And it is not easy, leaving him in that place. All I can do is promise to give him true love when I find it.