A Letter to My Dad

Would you go on writing...?

 Dear Dad,

 

 

 

I am a lot older now since I wrote you last.
I may be wiser but I doubt it.
I have been through many trials, have seen many things,
And I have learned many facts since my last letter.
If any of them has made me shrewd, I am not aware of it.

 

I just wanted to tell you that I have lived through
The Darkest Days, those days that overwhelmed you.
I now see a Dawning Light that I never new existed.
Even so, my life was not easy.
I had the same urges as you.

 

Many times, I wanted to fly off the edge of the Earth.
I wanted to soar up to Mars, walk in the red clay soil,
And commune with the inhabitants of that planet.
I still believe they exist.

 

But I never did Dad.
I guess it was just my dogged curiosity
That kept my feet on the planet of my birth.
All the chronicles I wrote about the Other People
Made me wonder about the diversity of these souls.
I wanted to see how many I could record for "prosperity's sake",
Whatever the hell that is.

 

I guess that when you were alive,
You never had this urge.

 

That's right Dad,
I know you are dead.
I've known you were dead since I was a child.
But I still write you letters,
And I will probably write until I die.

 

I know that you jumped off the roof of the house
And crashed to Earth so many years ago.
I know that you were looking for something,
Or someone, that did not exist in your life at that time.
Mom and I were not enough, and I am sorry for that.
It could be that your curiosity was truly greater than mine was,
It may have been so great that it could not be bounded
By Earthly means.
I have lived with this hope all my life.

 

You had different expectations of your generation
Than I now have of mine.
For a long time, I tried to fit the hopes of your
Love generation, which I read about in books, to my
Greed generation, which I read about in my newspaper.
The pieces did not fit well
Even though one generation spawned the other.

 

It was hard on me Dad.
I had to use every means to cope.
Drugs, alcohol, womanizing, false religions.
None of them worked to well.
I even tried on the lives of the people that made
Both of us crazy.
I was a fake nearly all of my life, Dad.
My only excuse is that most of the time,
It beat being lonely.

 

But I know that the greater burden was on you Dad.
You and your peers set out to change the world
And you did.
But when it started to change on its own,
In ways that were dissonant with your original ideals,
You were one of them who could not cope.
You refused to compromise your generation’s promises.
Instead, you chose to stand alone in a world
Populated by strangers.

 

I know how you felt Dad.
There were so many times I felt unloved
That I swore I was going to visit the same rooftop you did.
But I had a fear of flying.
I could never ascend the height
Or face the unknown as you did.

 

Now I am glad that I did not Dad.
It turned out that there was someone for me.
I call her my soul mate because our minds are so much like one,
Even though we did not start out this close.
We were both just afraid and lonely people looking
For a hand to hold.
I am very glad we found each other’s grasp.
She came to me and told me that I must cry no more
And I believed her Dad.

 

Whenever Mom sees us together,
I know she is thinking about you and remembering
Your early years together when you two were like us.
She tries to think of how she might have been able
To make things turn out different,
But I know she could not have Dad,
For I have faced the urges that pushed you off the roof,
I know how devastating they can be.

 

I tried to explain these feelings to Mom,
But talking about them only upset her,
So we never speak of them anymore.

 

I can tell you that Mom is finally happy.
She never met another man like you Dad,
So she never remarried.
Most of her life was an empty void
I was never able to fill no matter how much she loved me.

 

But now I have a son, Dad,
Who has become an inspiration for all of us.
Especially Mom.
She is so happy to be with him that
She treats him more like a son than she does me.
But that is fine Dad.
I am glad that I have finally done something
That has broken the grip of loneliness.
Which held her all these years.

 

There are many things I wish Dad.
One of them is that I wish you could see my child.
He is happy and healthy
And he will never have to face the feelings
Of being unloved
Like you and I did.

 

Another wish is this Dad:
I wish that I would be able to speak with you in death
As I never could in life.

 

It would have been easier to have you with me in life,
But I do understand why this was not possible
And I do not hate you Dad.
I never have and I never will.
If I had, I would never have written these letters.

 

Now I hope you are somewhere Dad,
Somewhere where you can read these letters.
Because the problem with them Dad,
The big problem with them Dad,
Is that I never knew where to send them.
I just never knew where to send them.

 

--Your Loving Son--

Author's Note

This is really prose, but there is no category for that.