China (Patreon)

My father was smoking a blunt out of the window of his car when he told me that he was moving to China.

I didn’t have any strong feelings about this because I had only just met him. But I asked him why he was going there.

He said:

“To hide.”

He died there a few years later and we weren’t able to get his body back for the funeral.

He was a bad guy. Kind of the prototypical bad guy. Beat his wife, abandoned his kids, had a temper and an ego. He liked to get drunk and high and drive around, and he spent a lot of time telling you his opinion.

When my ex girlfriend met him she said “He’s like you without all of the good parts.”

My mother was always careful to tell me the truth about my father. He’s violent, and that is why we left. He’s unreliable, so don’t trust him when he makes a promise. He could see his kids but chooses not to. My little 3 year old ears learning to listen with words like these.

But she was also careful not to demonize him. He wasn’t all bad. He was charismatic and generous. He was handsome and smart. He was funny and he could dance.

You look just like him.

The unrivalled star of the funeral. You look just like him!!! Knocking family members flat with a face I inherited from a stranger. I met dozens of relatives I had never known, barred from my life by a lie, and they told me their favourite stories about my father, as though it were camaraderie, as though it were communion, unaware that I didn’t know him like they knew him.

You look JUST like him. Spitting image. Reincarnation.

So casual, the way he invited me out. After 20 years I was only given 1 days notice. “I’m in town, wanna get dinner tomorrow?” As if we do this all the time.

When I opened my front door his first words to me were “Can I use your bathroom?”

… sure.

He just rambled on about his opinions and theories about everything and everyone until at some point I snapped and went for his throat. How do you live with yourself? What were you thinking?

He said if he didn’t leave us he would have killed me. Not my mom, not my brother, but me. Because unlike them, I’d fight back.

I would.

Later my mom reminded me that she left him, not the other way around.

Then I saw him that second time, a couple years later. Why does he never make eye contact with me? The only time I remember him looking directly into my eyes was when he said he would’ve killed me.

He had this skittering conversational style where it seemed like he was never really listening until an hour later when he references something you said verbatim. So you were listening, you just don’t make me feel listened to. Why don’t you make eye contact?

“I would have killed you.” No apology, just a statement. As though it weren’t up to him, and he did the most moral thing there was to do.

I didn’t grant him clemency. I gave him nothing.

I suppose being confrontational doesn’t make people particularly want to make eye contact with you. But I didn’t open like that. He was slithering as soon as I opened my door, but I was cordial until I broke. More than anything I was just trying to pin him down so I could actually learn something about him beyond his affect. Like a biologist trapping a cockroach in a glass.

I was doing recognizance. I wanted information. I wanted to study the foreign half of my DNA.

That’s why I asked why he was going to China. A lover? Certainly not. Not about to start sacrificing for others now. A job? Kind of. He was teacher, or something like it. He said he taught English in Thailand, but it always seemed like he was lying or leaving something out.

“To hide.”

I felt in that moment that I had finally learned something, but I didn’t know what.

...

How revealing. That’s a statement of fear. Or exhaustion.

You hide when something’s coming for you, and you can’t defeat it or you don’t want to try.

Fight or flight, hide or seek.

What would be coming for you that you need to hide from it on the other side of the planet?

Guess it got him. He died a year ago and no one knows how. He had a pacemaker, so probably a heart attack. He was fifty-something.

My grandfather also died of a heart attack at fifty-something. It happened after an altercation with his son. The story goes, the son screamed something nasty at his father and then stormed out of the building, unaware that those were the last words his father would ever hear. Grandpa dropped dead right as dad left.

I heard from others that my father harboured tremendous guilt about that. He felt responsible. Guilty, responsible. Those are funny words for him.

So that’s two generations of willful sons dying at fifty-something of a heart attack. I turn 25 this month. Spitting image. Halfway done.

Maybe that’s where this sense of urgency comes from. All that anxious energy and intensity. I’m running out of time and my body knows it.

Fight or flight. Always life or death, always high stakes, always fighting.

People admire me for that but they also resent me. My mother says it’s jealousy. My passion intimidates people and they want to shut it down so they feel less insecure about their lack of passion, or their fear of taking action. But that’s a very Mom thing to say—Child, the reason people dislike you is because you are so incredible.

There are other reasons to dislike me for that intensity.

For example, I am more familiar with lengthy confrontational texts than one should be. I am a craftsman of apologies from sheer practice. In this never-ending mission to be as interesting as possible I bruise egos and hurt feelings and violate unwritten emotional boundaries. I can only imagine the mild ache of anxiety that comes with being my friend. I might be incredibly supportive and funny and fascinating, but I also might be rude and insensitive and domineering. All that wild unearned confidence. You must never know which way it’s going to go. You must feel affection tainted by apprehension.

I have incredible friends these days. They confront me directly if they have a problem with me. They are communicative and I can correct. My heart is good and they know it. But I wonder about the conversations they have with each other, in between the harm and correction. I wonder how much negativity I bring into their lives that they then shield me from. I wonder if I’m the only friend they feel this way about. I wonder if I’m worth it.

It makes you want to hide.

My lovers tend to say they feel like a lower priority than my work. They might feel that way because they are. I want to finish all of this before I die, and I’m already 25. Tick tick tick.

When you get older, you garner more responsibilities. I will owe my wife or husband more than I owe my girlfriend or boyfriend. I will owe the partner I live with more than I owe a partner who has their own home. Then when you have a child, your life is fucking over. Nothing is higher priority than a screaming shitting crying pissing baby.

I mean it with reverence. Love takes you away from yourself. The center of the universe shifts from you to another. Reincarnation.

I look forward to it.

But he was immune to that.

He was immune to all of it.

…

“Your father used to say that exact same thing.”

On the phone with my mother, I say something that triggers a memory she never ascribed much importance to.

He was always urging her to be more independent. Get out of the house! Go see your friends! Do something for yourself! But she only ever wanted to stay home with her baby.

My mother says wistfully, lovingly, guiltlessly:

“Perhaps that was something that I did wrong.”

An ocean of empathy surges through me.

Over dinner my father asked how I could miss something I never had.

I have done nothing to you, and still it is not enough.

My lover suddenly bursts into tears, and I look up from my writing. I have been so distracted all day they feel invisible.

I have done nothing to you, and still it is not enough.

My friend tells me that I hurt their feelings. I apologize and modify myself.

My absence would be a gift.

I imagine my mother in my home all day with a screaming shitting crying pissing baby. 

I see myself through my fathers eyes.

I want to hide.