re: 9/15-9/16 / my bigger selling-out / the fake irreverence lament (9/16/25)
I have seen my father frequently, however disembodied behind the tinted façade of his e-mails and a black Mercedes-Benz’s windshield — though the last time I remember seeing my father in person, I was just fourteen years old. I recall few specifics of the time, only that his face was contorted into a deep-red grotesquery (rather, it was not contorted but at its resting state, because this is how his face near-always looked), and he was screaming about how he would soon “tear my head off.” My mother, I can safely claim to bear little resemblance to — with her provincial immobility, her eye attuned only to the tackiest of rural Virginian luxury, and her sharp mind for the mechanics of science — perhaps we share in many heritable neuroses, but across these daily, superficial traits there is a wide disparity obvious in our character. My father, though, is a mystery. As a child with little to grab onto, I often took to imagining him as being in possession of some tender and sensitive aspect behind that seething anger I most knew him for, a part of him which I could only ever grasp at the edges of; I clawed at this phantasmic vulnerability of his whenever he would sing hymns from various musicals, or listen to John Linnell tracks in his office. This is sickeningly romantic schlock on my part, and it only kept me through my thirteenth year under his hatred, until the contradictions present in this wishfulness became too strong and I began to abandon this notion of any secret grace. Instead, I started to paint him in the journals I then-kept as simply an angry man, hopelessly subjugate to his own emotions — he was only the sum of a hundred red-faced nights.
In her memoir Fun Home, author Alison Bechdel describes the reality of appraising her own parents simply: “my parents are most real to me in fictional terms.” So it is for me, too, my only method of even approaching some reckoning (forgiveness?) with my parents has historically been by way of their breaking-up into analyzable characters, their very real abuses generously given all the inhuman distance of literary trope. Referring to them in this manner, and resultantly by their first names, of course drew their ire frequently — but behind my surface disrespect was actually the greatest kindness I could have afforded them at the time, because to recognize them as being the same flesh as I would also have been to condemn their parenting regime as too real to be forgiven. In this process, my mother was sparingly easy to dissect: the tragedy of her own upbringing traced nicely along the contours of a conventional narrative, one which neatly arrived at its only possible conclusion: her recreation of the tragedy as an adult, begetting my own shambolic childhood. My father, however. His great evils (greater than my mother’s) bear no clear cause-and-effect relationship with his idyllic background, chaperoned adequately by loving parents in a simple suburban environment — as an adult, I realize this sort of inexplicability is far more common in people, we are each made victim to the million factors which collide with us each day and as such “conventional narrative” plays almost no role in shaping our behaviors and characters. Though as a child, this notion was insurmountable for me, and his mystery was the greatest to sit upon my mind; in this way, he became to me more like an irreconcilable force of evil, more a portrait of his aggressions than a human being — so goes that remnant analysis from my teenage years. And in this way, I was set to meet him in the shadow of my own angry defeat, on the evening of September Fifteenth.
This must be impossible: as I was growing up, running away had been my highest ideal. Both a solution to my woes and a means of confirming that they really did exist so drastically. I had kept my car close to me from the moment I learned to drive, as a symbol it was so encompassingly potent and synonymous with both exit and self-savior (the same thing to me, then) — in coming to the city of Boston, I gave up this symbol. Among many things, this choice was a recognition that I was now deciding to be stuck here, that I would not be seeking to leave for quite some time — and by this decision I was rendered conceptually immobile as my father’s imminent presence in Boston was announced to me. It was an unassuming e-mail, with a subject line vague enough to draw me in: “9/15-9/16.” I now had nothing with which to fight it, and as such I took the train to see him as soon as an appointment was arranged between us; I sat immobile as we traversed that interminable space between my Allston residence and our Back Bay rendezvous. And while aboard I remembered that, when I had taken the same train line to visit my then-estranged mother downtown under a similar (yet dimmer) light of terror, ███ had been waiting in her own car, anticipating any indication of a necessary bail-out should something have gone wrong. But as the train rumbled toward Back Bay, she was not idling by, in fact there was nobody now to give me that getaway ride and I briefly could not stand that thought — what am I doing? this is a transparently self-inflicted wound, I realized. In a locally-confined narrative this might have been my lowest point, in which my character suffers blows so great that she claws at the dirt and attempts to punish and humiliate herself further; no matter what line I tell about being “coerced” into seeing him by threat of my non-attendance potentially jeopardizing my college fund, of which his new wife is conservator, or perhaps my absence simply incensing the situation in a way which could be taken out on my siblings — it is untrue. In fact, I am visiting him of my own volition. Because in the brief time since we broke up, ███ and I are both desecrating the memory of our late relationship by fucking and falling in love with other people, without even one-tenth so much careful deference as it all deserves. And I only want to give our tragedy the level of large-scale gestural self-harm that it probably does deserve, and can get nowhere else, as a matter of respect for it — or, I could be merely hurting myself in the same, simple injury that repeatedly listening to the albums we fell in love over is. I alternated between the two minds about it for a time, uncertain of just how noble I wished to imagine myself; though either way it could perhaps be best understood as a self-imposed plot to rectify our (my?) irreverence for the parting. And I feel like a sort of thief, accordingly, when my friends spend their concern on this crisis of the Fifteenth, which I have invented. I brought it all on myself, they do not seem to understand or care. In Fun Home (which ███ had me read about a month prior to our breakup), Alison Bechdel says while writing of her own childhood journal-taking: “False humility, overwrought penmanship, and self-disgust began to cloud my testimony…”
Perhaps, too, I was acting in slavish accordance with my own guilt; infidelity, stubbornness, difficulty and sexlessness were all the contradictory paragon virtues of my parents, and as well they were those impulses in myself which felled my relationship with ███. So it must only make sense for me to then meet with one of their chief professors, in this wake of their exacted damage; I must bring votives and continue the march of my true loyalty to the family morals, which are certainly the only thing I deserve amidst my maladroit emotional stuntedness. In my mind, this revelation came followed by a contradicting thought: it might actually be good for me to re-confront what is truly awful in my world, to see the face of the highest evil which I have distanced myself so entirely from — this as opposed to deluding myself into the belief that my present moment of despair is truly world-ending — I just need some perspective! Or, could it be simply a relief to act out? To customarily affirm the existence of my woes to myself, in a similar (yet different) motion as my past running-aways? On the train, I restlessly tried to divine from basically nothing what secret, innate reason I must have kept for going to see my father, though in this I only ended up inventing new reasons to do so. They accumulated, and built for me an unbeatable case to stay on that train to Back Bay. For a moment, I wished there were still someone who I would allow to talk me down from this; I presently have no-one who I would allow to talk me down from this. Which burnt me even further and hardened my injurious resolve; I continued on the train.
Had fate blessed me with the windfall luck to be a complete hack, here is where the narrative’s insipid twist might be revealed by myself, who is in this more an aspiring advertiser than a writer. With a mere curtain pull, my vaguely-worded “visit to my father” would actually be unmasked as a visit to his gravestone, the tone suddenly shifting to that of an even more overbearingly flailing attempt at closure in a world with none (or, perhaps, a stronger-still tone of abandoning closure altogether on account of its absence). But, no, there is no such sleight-of-hand. He is still so goddamned alive, and this is all still happening to me. If there were any inversion of the narrative to here insert, it would be that our rendezvous was overwhelmingly pedestrian — beyond the occasional flickering of harbored resentment, at which I always flinched, we played perfectly our role of adults without a bitter history. His face seemed older, thinner, and only comically sinister as it was lit underneath by flickering red candlelight at the upscale bar in which we together dined. The imagery of it was far too much for me to be intimidated by, I ended up only deeply exhausted. I could not bring myself to feel that fear I had held onto for so long. I could hardly muster indignation as he described the new family, the new wife and the new daughter, through which he obviously loved and parented semi-vicariously — though perhaps here I elected to ascribe in him a guilty conscience, a man seeking (hopelessly) to right his wrongs through the people still capable of giving him a second chance. The tragedy in this was seductive, it was an invention of myself alone. In reality, he provided no such indication of remorse beyond these dubiously-inlaid clues, which I desperately took for myself over the course of the night.
…What have I done? What have I taken? I have set myself to suffer at a table with one-half of what terrorized my childhood, and gained nothing for it — not even the self-satisfaction of a good wound. The closest to this which I was granted had been only a full day of agonizing prior to the appointment, a trivial affair in my nervous lifestyle. All I have done is undermine myself, all I have taken from it is reason to be blinded once more by my proclivity for these romanticizations, these self-deceptions about his secret grace and hidden vulnerability — but what of the childhood abuses suffered? — I brush these aside in my wistfulness. I have undone the distance I once drove between Boston and Virginia. I have discounted the memory of my enveloping teenage woe. And, meekly, he apologizes for having not been present in this latter half of my upbringing — as though it were not also his prior presence which was just as (or more) harmful — while he says this apology I keep a debasedly straight face, and I bring myself to say or do nothing in response but count the years since I last saw him. Since that final day, when I was fourteen and he was totally bent by rage: there have been seven years. I cannot make out the color of his eyes or the exact constitution of his face in the dim red candlelight, they are still basically foreign to me. But there is little gentleness in my life currently, so it was in this moment that we both realized we would rather pretend our history had never happened at all. That we do actually share so much in common, as father and daughter, and in fact have nothing hidden behind all those vaguely hostile allusions to my childhood. We would rather make pleasant conversation and exhaustedly resist the gravity of all that happened. I know this is not really possible, but for that single disrespectful night it was — in this way, it cut me more than any other outcome could have. But I received free food and free drinks, what more could you ask of life?