Father

For most of my life, my father was nothing more
than a silhouette in our family album.

When I was seven,
my mother woke me in our apartment in Moscow
and told me to pack my belongings.
We didn’t say goodbye to my father.

The next morning, we arrived in California.
I didn’t understand it then, but it would be our new home.
For my Mom, the way to forget my father was simple.
She cut his image out of every family photograph.
For me, those holes made it harder to erase him.

In America, I waited for him to come find me.
He never did.
I often wondered what it would have been like to have a father.
I still do.

2024

I’ve spent 15 years without him.
I have only a few memories left.
In one we’re dancing together.
In another he’s walking out of our apartment.

Growing up, I tried to ask my mother about him.
“I am forgetting his eyes,” I said.
“Good,” she replied. “I forgot them a long time ago.”
If someone would ask me about my father, I would say he had died.
It was easier than trying to make sense of why he wasn’t there.

He told me he had been looking for me.
He opened a suitcase filled with newspaper clippings,
undelivered letters and a shirt for my brother’s future wedding.
Items my grandfather put aside in case he would meet us again one day.

But that was the past.
The man standing across from me didn’t recognize me.
I didn’t recognize him either. I felt out of place.

Right after I move in, my father has another child, a little girl.
I should be happy for him, but I am not.
Why does she get to have him, and I don’t?

Even now.
There are moments when he seems to open up a little.
Like the night he shared his poetry with me,
or the evening at the symphony.
He sneaks in chocolates; we eat them in the dark.
But then he’s gone,

When my father’s home,
I often don’t know how behave around him.
Sometimes he watches me brush my hair or reaches to hug me.
I pull away.