culled from everything2.com [with slight editing] : -sometimes, do you wish you were someone else, someone with a better house, more than one car, nice children who did everything you told them to, white picket fence sunday afternoons spent at church dinners at the relatives at the coast...? -don't you know that whatever respect i have for you is lost when you yell and treat me like shit? (if it wasn't so often maybe i could call it a character flaw) (or when you don't have the courage to treat me at all) what did you see in my mother that made you think she was the one? why won't you grant me one wish and just leave me the hell alone? why didn't you ever teach me about stopping to smell the flowers? were you so busy easing my upbringing that you forgot to teach me stuff? when does it all start to make sense? did you know all along? should I? What do you think of me? what do you think of yourself? am I that different? What do you think of the way your life turned out? What is the one thing I've done that's made you proudest of me? Mom has told me... Were you disappointed when I was nine and called our hiking trip short because I missed my mom? Do you really like my girlfriend? do you know that i'm constantly searching on aol to try and find you, not to talk to you -- just to see what you'd say on your profile? do you know how helpless i feel sometimes without you around to fix things? do you know how badly i wish i had paid attention to everything when you were teaching me things only so i wouldn't have to feel so helpless?? maybe you just never did ... do you know who i am? do you know what matters to me? so many fathers who don't realize how important they are He was more of a loner, kind of like me I guess. Didn't have any real friends. Not even his brother. Kind of like my brother and me. My father, the King of ego-deflation This is my ability to read, hunched over index cards crying and muttering sentence after sentence with his shoe two inches away from my head in case I failed. This is the girl in the blue computer glare, hiding behind a chair and reciting her addition. And this is me, enraged, spitting into the sink because that way maybe I won't have to vomit. This is how I never learned to fail, and I know it will happen someday. Someday I'll prove what I already know: that I'm not perfect, and that all of you will hate me when you see that that is true. When I stand before you naked, through my work, and through my testimony, asking you to love me and certain this will happen again. The shoe comes down. This is me in a dirty sweatshirt fifteen years later when I can't spend my money and keep eating and eating and eating, convinced that I'm amounting to nothing. Crying into a dishpan. He never let me go. That lonely, bitter old bastard who set up so many walls in my head I can barely get out. I watch him when I go home and see his pain. His pain so much worse than mine, where he is, alone, with no way out. And I wonder if he could have been happier another way, or how I can hate a man who so clearly hates himself so much there's no room to love anybody else. Not even a daughter who tried so hard...