i hate my dad

the blood we share should’ve been enough for you to claim me, but it’s been a long time since you bothered to pick up the phone. you trained me to wait by the door, by the silence, like a kid who learned early that love came in checked boxes and scraps, that attention was something you earned by being small enough. i learned to cling to every moment with you like oxygen, like i would suffocate the second you pulled away, which you always did.

i hate how much of me is built from your absence, because you don’t deserve the credit. you deserve nothing. i deserved a father. i deserved someone in the stands who could “give a damn”, someone who showed up without being begged. you never did, and somehow i spent years convincing myself that was my fault.

you broke something in me and called it resilience. you planted this sickness in my head and now i carry it everywhere, contaminating everything i touch, apologizing for the weight of my own sadness like it’s a personal failure instead of a wound you left untreated. i blamed myself for the way my brain twists, for how my heart hurts, but that lie only protects you. this is on you.

you abandoned me with the mess and expected gratitude for the debris you tossed back occasionally, just enough affection to keep me hopeful, just enough change to make me doubt my memory. how do you do that? how do you give so little and still walk away clean, still become someone i don’t recognize while i’m left to unlearn you in everything i am.

i don’t want to be sick anymore. i don’t deserve this rot living in my chest, and i never did. i deserved more than what you left me with, and you ruined me pretending you were doing your best. the scars run so deep i can’t tell where i end and you begin. i open myself up and find you everywhere. every time i feel wrong or evil or broken, it sounds like you, looks like you, moves like you. you were my superhero once, you were everything and you turned me into nothing. worth nothing. good for nothing. fucking useless, fucking disposable. you taught me that language and let me drown in it, and i believed it because it came from you.

but this sickness in my head is not mine. it was planted, fed, rewarded, and abandoned, and i will not carry it like it belongs to me anymore. i will not let you ruin me for the last time. i want to be something, and i will be without your shadow stitched into every thought, without your poison claiming my name. you don’t get to live inside me anymore.