The Wreckage We Have Become

Two innocent souls who never chose existence; Thrust into a world of fracturing glass, Their eyes once mirrors of boundless wonder Now reflect the wreckage we’ve become. I see them watching, learning, absorbing The venom-laced narrative you’ve crafted: “Your father, the monster. Your father, the failure.” While you parade as martyred saint. Do they know of the handcuffs that bit my wrists? The metal cold against my trembling skin, As I was torn from what little remained Of the family I would have died protecting. Do they hear my phone ringing endlessly into void? Messages sent like prayers to a silent god, Read but ignored, as though my desperation Is something to savor rather than answer. Can they picture their father sprawled Across bare apartment floors at midnight, My body convulsing with the kind of sobs That leave a man hollowed by morning? You were once radiant; a model mother, Your laughter the soundtrack to our better days. Now you’re the conductor of this demolition, Engineering the collapse of what we built. I watch you transform into someone unrecognizable, Twisting into shapes your mother carved for you, While our children stand witnessing the metamorphosis, Inheriting the poison that flows between generations. They never asked for this inheritance of pain, These children with eyes that used to shine for me. Their innocence peeled away like sunburned skin, Replaced by cynicism decades too early. You’ve painted me villain with masterful strokes, A deadbeat, a monster, a cautionary tale. The children repeat your words with perfect mimicry, Not knowing they’re speaking another’s hatred. In quiet moments I wonder what they remember, Do flashes of our better days still visit them? Or have you scrubbed their memories clean of joy, Replaced with fabrications that serve your story? I am more than the character in your revenge play, More than the demon you’ve conjured from anger. I am the man who once held them as they slept, Who would have moved mountains to keep them safe. Now I lie shattered on cold laminate flooring, Coming undone in ways no child should witness, My love for them the only constant in this chaos, Though it reaches them now as a distant echo. Two children, never asked to witness this collapse; Caught in crossfire they cannot comprehend, The trainwreck spectators with front-row seats To the destruction of everything that should be sacred. What gods will judge us for this desecration? What mercy exists for parents who wage such war? I carry the weight of my absence like stones in my chest, But you, you carry the burden of their programmed hearts. When they grow beyond your careful conditioning, When they seek truth with adult eyes someday, Will they forgive either of us for this battlefield? Or will they run, rucksacks packed, shoes laced tight? I have become the ghost you needed me to be, But ghosts have memories, and ghosts can wait. Through darkness and handcuffs and unanswered calls, I remain; watching, loving, grieving what we’ve lost. Two children who never asked to be here, Now navigate the wreckage of what we’ve become. Their inheritance: the bitter lessons of love’s failure And the searing knowledge that nothing sacred endures.

The Rucksack and Running Shoes

Always by the door they wait, My rucksack and running shoes, Ready for the midnight flight From places I never could call home. I learned early to travel light, To leave no trace, make no deep imprints. A ghost boy growing into a shadow man, Forever feeling like the unwelcome guest. In this northern pocket of nowhere, Where dreams dissolve in bottles and needles, Where family trees twist and break Under generations of hardship, I glimpsed salvation in an open road, A truck, a camper, the three of us Moving through landscapes unclouded By our histories or anyone's expectations. Those highway days were my paradise. Strangers in towns with no memory of us, Just a father, a mother, a child laughing As if happiness could be that simple. At thirty-four, I've learned the bitter truth: Systems aren't built for keeping love intact. The game was rigged against us from the start, Two broken children trying to parent whole. You chose your mother's path—the promise Of stability she dangled like a locket, While I remained committed to our nomad dream, Unable to reconcile these diverging roads. I surrendered my vision and came home, Trading freedom for familiar walls, Because I had sworn upon their newborn heads I would never become my father's ghost. The trades were meant to be temporary, A steppingstone toward our homestead, Where I could be present every moment, Not just the exhausted shadow at bedtime. I rose before dawn, drove through blizzards, Returned after dark to sleeping faces, Seeking refuge in the bottle to numb The pain of missing everything that mattered. You had enough, how could I blame you? The man you loved had vanished into work, Into fatigue, into obligation and debt, While you carried the weight of everyday alone. Now courtrooms twist my sacrifice to sin, Paint me monster when I meant provider. The revelation of intentional pregnancies A knife-twist in an already bleeding wound. My children look through me now, not at me, Taught to see a villain where once stood father. The only crime I committed was absence, Trying to build security from nothing. I'm reduced to numbers on paper, A paycheck, a visitation schedule, A man hollowed by system and circumstance, While watching you become someone I don't know. Your mother's shadow grows longer between us, As our children lose the childhood we promised, And I stand helpless at the edge of their lives, Clutching court orders instead of small hands. Every night, I keep them by the door, My rucksack and running shoes, Not for escape now, but as memorial To the wanderer who once believed in happy endings. I pray something keeps them safe When I cannot stand guard or guide their way. I pray someday they'll understand the choice Between being present and providing. But tonight, I just watch the empty road, Where karma travels at its own slow pace, And wonder when it arrives, if any of us Will recognize salvation when it comes.

Dear Dad, Who Is Kept from His Child

I know you don't talk about it much; Not the way the grief has hollowed the space behind your sternum into a permanent cavity, Not the way your breath catches mid-inhale when a child with the same hair color crosses your periphery, Not the way your knuckles blanch white against the steering wheel each time you drive past the turn to their street, That street you've memorized from satellite images, though you're forbidden from its asphalt. Not the way you return each night to that bare apartment on the east side; Third floor walkup with the flickering hallway light you've stopped reporting, The key that sticks in the lock you've never bothered to fix, The door that opens to darkness and emptiness and silence, Save for the clicking of your aging rescue’s nails against laminate flooring, The only greeting you receive day after day after identical day. Not the way it annihilated the architecture of your future, To love a child whose growth you've tracked through algorithms and stranger's photographs, Whose height you can only estimate by comparing them to nearby objects in social media glimpses, Whose handwriting evolved from crayon-pressed spirals to cursive to teenage scrawl without your witness, Whose voice broke or softened without your ear to register the metamorphosis. You tried with the desperate persistence of a man tunneling through a mountain with broken silverware. You called through 1,469 disconnected numbers and blocked contacts, Through holidays that yawned like abyssal trenches and Tuesdays that throbbed like phantom limbs. You called until your voice grew hoarse, until your phone bill stretched to seventeen pages, Until the rehearsed messages; carefully calibrated between affection and legal compliance, Became a catechism of unanswered devotion repeated into digital voids. Each night you return to those rooms where shadows collect like dust, Where the refrigerator hums an off-key lullaby to its meager contents, Where dinner is whatever requires the least effort, eaten standing at the counter, Or sitting on that secondhand chair with its permanent depression on the left side; Your side, the only place that bears the imprint of human presence. The dog curled against your thigh, patient companion to your silence, Both of you bathed in the blue glow of late-night television, The volume low because any noise feels like trespassing in that mausoleum of almost living. You showed up when the capricious gates of visitation creaked open their negligible width; Standing in fluorescent-lit rooms with their disinfectant smell and observation windows, In clothes purchased specifically for these supervised hours from the department store three towns over, Collared shirts with moisture-wicking fabric to hide the nervous perspiration, Shoes polished the night before with military precision on newspaper spread across your bare kitchen floor, The dog watching from the doorway, the only witness to your preparation rituals. Your smile reconstructed from fragmentary memories of how happiness once felt, Every word measured with pharmacological precision, Every gesture calculated through sleepless rehearsals before the bathroom mirror with its single bulb, The only mirror in that apartment where you've stopped seeing your reflection, Focusing instead on the technique of appearing "appropriately engaged yet not overwhelming." And afterward, you return to those four walls that contain nothing of you, No photographs on beige walls you've never painted, No pictures stuck to the refrigerator with souvenir magnets, No evidence of human habitation beyond the essentials: A second hand; unused mattress on a metal frame, sheets washed but never matched, A television with no cable on a homemade stand because the previous tenant left it, A stack of unopened DVDs your sister brought from dads after he passed away, I can’t open. The kitchen with its single plate, single bowl, single mug, The cabinet containing three protein shake bottles from the grocery store sale rack, The drawer with takeout menus yellowing at the edges, The sink that always holds exactly one rinsed coffee mug, meticulously clean Despite the chaos you carry within. And every night, the dog follows you from room to sparse room, The clickety-clack of his nails marking time against the floor, His water bowl the only thing you consistently maintain, His food measured carefully while yours is afterthought, His walks the only thing that gets you out of that place between visitations, His heartbeat against your feet at night the only warmth in a recliner too small for two, Too empty for rest, too quiet for dreams that don't turn to nightmares. Your apartment transmuted into a reliquary of suspended fatherhood, Where the spare bedroom remains in perpetual readiness for an occupant legally barred from entry, A stark contrast to the ascetic emptiness of your own sleeping space, Where you exist rather than live, in a monk's cell of self-denial. The bedroom where you've pinned blankets over windows because curtains seemed too permanent, Where the streetlights still manage to pulse like an accusation against the darkness, Where insomnia has worn a valley into the center of a mattress you've never replaced. And I know how people inscribed assumptions into your personhood with judicial certainty. I know they whispered vitriol masked as insight: "He must have deserved this," "There's always a reason," "The courts favor good fathers," "If he really tried..." Their venomous litany delivered over wine glasses and backyard barbecues, While you eat cold pasta from the pot, standing over the sink, The dog's expectant eyes watching from the floor, The only creature who witnesses your silent grace before meals, Your whispered good nights, your 3 a.m. sobbing jags muffled into pillows. They never noticed how your clothes hang looser each year, How you've stopped getting haircuts that aren't strictly necessary for court appearances, How you no longer buy anything that isn't essential, Save for the dog's food that consumes what little remains after child support, After rent for an apartment, you never wanted, After Medication, you never wanted or needed to be on. The child support payments that consumed 98% of your net worth; That forced the surrender of your health insurance and retirement savings, That necessitated the hunt for a second job, despite losing the firsr Returning to an apartment where no lights welcome you home, Just the muffled whine of recognition from behind the door, The eager thump of tail against hardwood, The only celebration of your existence in that sterile space. You carry guilt you didn't earn, heavy as depleted uranium poisoning your marrow fiber by fiber. You carry grief that never diminishes, a phantom conjoined twin surgically attached to your consciousness, That watches from the passenger seat where the height of the headrest is still adjusted for a ten-year-old, That sits opposite you at dinner where you still unconsciously cut food into bite-sized safety portions, Though no child sits at your scratched table with its single chair. That whispers from the mirror where your face has mapped the cartography of systematic loss, Each line around your eyes a record of 17,520 hours of sleepless vigilance. These vigils kept in the blue-dark of your living room, Where you and the dog keep sentinel through another empty weekend, Her head heavy on your knee, your hand absently stroking graying fur, Both of you aging in the half-light of a life kept on perpetual hold. You carry a love that has had nowhere to safely land for 2,192 days and counting, Like a migratory bird whose ancestral nesting grounds were deliberately contaminated, Circling and circling through lightning storms that singe its feathers, Through drought that parches its throat, through predators that snap at its weakening wings, Through seasons that blur into a single extended moment of disoriented searching. But please hear this truth I offer like arterial blood to the critically wounded: Your child will know someday, when the architectural facade of fabrication begins to collapse under its own weight. One day, they'll ask the questions that have gestated like embryos frozen in suspended animation. One day, they'll discover the USB drives you've buried in waterproof capsules beneath the maple tree in your parents' yard, Containing 2,192 video diaries—one for every day since the separation— Recorded in that same bare living room, the dog aging visibly beside you in each entry, Your voice steady even as the walls behind you never change, No new pictures, no fresh paint, no signs of moving forward, Just you and the dog and the unchanging landscape of waiting. They'll see the same lamp with its crooked shade in the background, The same threadbare cushion with the dog's indentation, The same mug of cooling coffee on the side table missing its mate, The same man growing older in carefully pressed shirts reserved for these recordings, A visual diary of stasis, of life suspended in amber, Of an apartment that never became a home because home requires the heartbeat that was taken from you. They'll see how you maintained that separate bedroom in museum-grade preservation While sleeping yourself on a mattress with broken springs, How you kept their childhood photographs in sterling silver frames While your own walls remained bare as monastery cells, How you stored their outgrown clothes in cedar-lined trunks While your own hung from wire hangers in a closet with a door that doesn't close, How you preserved every card, every school paper, every crayon drawing in acid-free sleeves While your own mail piles unopened on a counter's corner. So keep showing up in whatever subatomic, quantum, theoretical ways the byzantine legal system allows. Even if it's just prayers whispered into predawn darkness where you've mapped constellations into your ceiling plaster, Naming stars after your child's imagined evolving characteristics—Resilience, Compassionate, Discerning— While the dog snores softly from her bed beside yours, The soundtrack to your solitary astronomical observations. Even if it's just love transmitted across the legally mandated 500 yards of separation, Even if it's just waiting with the immovable permanence of tectonic plates, Even if it's just returning night after night to that spartan apartment, Where the only decoration is a single framed photograph on your nightstand, Face-down when company rarely comes but turned upright each night before sleep, The last thing you see before darkness and the first thing you reach for at dawn. Even if it's just you and the dog, growing old together in parallel silence, Her muzzle whitening as your temples gray, Her steps slowing as your shoulders stoop, Both of you marking time in an apartment that remains a way station, Never a destination, never truly inhabited, Just the place where you wait for a reunion that legal documents say may never come. Because the kind of father who wants to be there, Who aches with the thermonuclear intensity of stellar fusion to be there— Who purchases greeting cards for eighteen consecutive birthdays in advance, Dating and storing them in acid-free protective sleeves in a closet that holds nothing for himself, Who maintains college savings accounts despite restraining orders and supervised visitations, Who rehearses conversations with seven different age-progressed versions of your child While the dog listens from her bed, the most attentive audience to your practiced dialogues— Is still a father in ways that transcend court documentation and corrupted testimony. And that kind of love doesn't disintegrate into atomic particles or memory. It holds on with roots that penetrate through tectonic plates and electromagnetic core. It grows in oxygen-deprived subterranean chambers, finding microscopic nutrients in geological impossibility. It stays when laws and judges and evaluators have abandoned all pretense of human comprehension. It lives in that bare apartment where nothing flourishes except devotion, Where the refrigerator holds little food, but magnets stand ready for artwork, Where closets contain no luxuries, but space remains for small shoes, Where your life occupies minimal space so there will always be room for theirs, Where the dog has learned to sleep on only half the couch, Leaving space beside you that never fills but always waits, Where the television is always set to record cartoons no one watches, Where birthday candles live in the drawer though no cakes are ever baked. Just like you have, through 52,608 unbearable hours of engineered absence. Just like you will, through uncertain decades of heartbeats counted like rosary beads. Just like you are— A father biologically complete yet legally rendered fragment, A parent whole despite the surgical excision of your parental rights, A love undiminished by topographies deliberately constructed to exhaust your resources, A presence essential in its court-mandated invisibility. A man who returns each night to darkness broken only by the scrabble of paws against the door, To emptiness interrupted only by the faithful presence of aging canine loyalty, To silence pierced only by the occasional whimper of dog dreams and the constant ache of your own, To an apartment that never became a home because half its heart was legally excised, To rooms that remain transitional no matter how many years you pay the rent, To a life suspended between what was and what should have been, With only the dog as witness to the vigil you maintain, Night after night after identical night, Until truth arrives or time runs out.