I wish this was fiction.

Here's something I wrote in the wee hours the other night. Lord, with a family history like mine, who even needs to make shit up?! This is what I won't write to my father, because I won't write to my father at all . . .

September 20, 2007. FAKE FATHERS

How does the heart know to miss something it never had?

You were as much a part in my life as any other. I dwelled with the shadow of you, the absence of you, your non-entity, as surely as I went through my day to day with my mother, friends, relatives, lovers, strangers. Often I struggled with my anger at you, disappointment in you, and sadness about you. I lived with the example of you, the warning of you, the tightrope of not turning out in the smallest way like you.

What is a father? What shape does that take? What does it do inside of a family? Growing up I would pick out fake fathers to have: handsome, tall, kind, funny, someone with a mustache, strong and able, a garbage disposal of food, a Fixer of Anything Broken, a Dealer with All Manner of Gross Things (slugs, cockroaches, and taking out the trash), someone reliable and steady and able to hold down a job that preferably required a tie, or at very least slacks to be worn with an aloha shirt. They were former Peace Corps and advertising executives and professors and doctors and journalists and lawyers and activists. They were the kind that would sit you on their knee while it was still age appropriate, or swing you in the air while they could still bear your weight. They were the kind that would still bring mother flowers or take her dancing, and wouldn’t expect dinner on the table at a certain time. They were someones who’d give prom dates a hard time about curfew. They were TV dads, gentle, somewhat harried by their women, yet taking it all in stride.

But even fake fathers let you down. One of my favorite fake fathers was a sort of quiet, behind-the-scenes, steady provider for wife and two kids. He did his 9-to-5 at the Ad Agency and employed me to babysit his two sons so he and his wife could go on dates. He wasn’t handsome, but he wasn’t not, and he was tall. He was pleasant, and mild, and so dependable … until the day he left his wife, cleaned out their bank accounts, deserted his children, sold the house out from under them, and revealed a decades-long affair he’d been having with a childhood sweetheart of his, back somewhere in the Midwest.

So, even fake fathers pretended to want one thing when really they wanted another. Even fake fathers made promises they couldn’t keep. Even fake fathers changed their dreams and maintained that it was their dreams that were most important.

I hear from my half-brother that you want to write me a letter. And I have the power to permit this or to refuse. A very hard part of me wants nothing to do with you, with your words, with anything you might have to say. What even could you say at this point, and what could you possibly hope to come of this? What kind of person do you think I am? Do you think I’m the type that’s been waiting for this day, breathlessly sitting by some proverbial phone for you to call? Have you in your mind fashioned me from the best bits of my mother? Have you attributed to me certain pieces of you that I wouldn’t even understand were “you”? Have you decided twenty-five long years later that what is missing from your life as you are reaching the other side of it is the child you never got to know?

And what could I possibly have to say to you? How can I even hear the words coming out of your mouth when the last words you spoke to my two-year-old self involved you leaving my mother and I to follow your dreams? Why weren’t my mother and I dream enough? And what made you so special that you got to follow dreams while the rest of us dealt with reality? And what of your dreams? Did you ever publish That Novel? Did you ever win your critical acclaim?

I don’t remember you, or that house, or what it was like to have a father for a fraction of two years. I don’t remember anything. Not even—bless his gentle heart and I hate to write these words—Bluewater. I was so little, and things changed very fast.