I loved my dad. The man as he was, not the softened ghost people talk about later.
The man who smelled like cigarettes, weed, leather, beer, and that frosted Calvin Klein cologne.
The man who called me bibbet, and for a moment it made everything feel safe.
The man who yelled for me at school events like the world needed to know I belonged to him.
The man with that ridiculous evil-twin freckle-patch on his stomach.
The man with hands that were scraped, stained, scarred — hands that told the truth about who he was long before his words ever could.
The words would never come.
My love for him was bone-deep, instinctive, unfiltered. The kind that forms before you understand anything about the world.
I still cannot forgive the way he left.
Not because of the mysteries people try to project onto him. Not because of the story they spin about pain.
Because of the shockwave his ending sent through me.
His death wasn’t a moment. It was a rupture.
It tore the air out of my lungs.
It turned my childhood into shrapnel.
It rewired my nervous system into a constant low-grade earthquake.
I became a child who watched the door, listened for danger, trusted nothing steady.
He left a crater in my family that still has edges sharp enough to bleed on.
People say you can’t understand.
I have only one response.
I grew up threaded through with grief so tight it became part of my personality. I learned to keep going when everything inside me wanted to collapse. I stayed alive through storms he never saw.
There’s no closure for that.
There’s only this:
I miss him with a grief that still burns. I hate the way he left with a fury that still bites. I hold the memories of him — good, loud, chaotic — like they’re hot in my hands. I keep the parts of him that shaped me and I bear the scar of the part that didn’t.
He mattered. I mattered.
The impact of his leaving is carved into my life like a fault line.
I loved him.
He left.
The echo of that choice still lives under my skin.