There’s a point in life where you come to a cold, hard realization: you won’t see certain people again. It’s not a dramatic thought; it’s just a quiet, sober fact. Like when you’re hugging your grandmother in some piss-stinking hospice, her body connected to tubes, and they’ve just started the final drip. You have work, a project to finish. Your kid has school. The bills still need to be paid. So you kiss her on her waxy forehead, knowing, just knowing, this is the last time. But you still lie. You still say, “Next time, we’ll do this or that.”
With me leaving for Argentina in the next six months, that clock is ticking loud in my own head. It makes you prioritize. So I’m making damn sure to get in the needed time with my kids. A get-together this summer at Seal Beach. A trip to New York in October. I’m getting my son out here to Arizona one more time. These are the things that matter.
Which brings me to the fly-fishing trip. The one with my organic father and his two other sons, my half-brothers. A trip to Brush Creek to “celebrate the life” of my uncle, his brother. The dates changed, and then the plan changed. Instead of meeting at my aunt’s house in L.A. and driving up together like we used to, they decided they’d fly into San Bernardino, leaving everyone else to fend for themselves.
And just like that, in true form, my organic father created an “us and them” environment. It was a small thing, but it was everything. It triggered something in me, and I pulled away from the whole damn thing.
And in that moment, I understood. This was it. This fly fishing trip will be the last time I’d ever have a chance to see him.
Our relationship, it wasn’t some screaming match anymore. The war was over. We weren’t dropping the usual bombs on each other—”you’re a racist,” “you’re a Nazi,” all that cheap, tired ammunition.
I just have no motivation left in my heart or my head to compromise, to chase after him. He’s got my phone number, my email address. The line is open on my end if he ever decides to use it.
So this is our last stance, then. A quiet, mutual agreement to just let the whole goddamn thing bleed out and die right here.
So with that knowledge, that this is it, the end of the line, someone suggested I should drop my whole life and run to him. For one more hug. For some kind of “acceptance.”
Fuck that.
The good memories I have of him, they’re burned into my mind, and I’m happy for them. But all the other shit I’ve shared with you, that’s not my primary thought anymore. There’s nothing left to forgive, because I’m done hating him. But you have to understand the final stage of it all. After all the attempts to recover, after the apologies that never come, you have to disconnect. You forgive them, for your own goddamn sanity. Then you forget them. You move on with your life, and you adopt a simple policy: you never pay for the same piece of real estate twice.
So what’s the outcome? Do you love yourself enough to keep the people who hurt you at a distance? These toxic relationships you didn’t choose, this colossal family fuck-up you were just born into by some random chance. It’s been over eight years since that man was fully in my life. And in moments of reflection, I don’t miss him. I miss my father, Jim Orsillo. I miss my grandmothers. I miss my grandfather. I miss anybody and everybody who ever gave me a single, solitary drop of unconditional love. I needed more time with them.
But my organic mother and father? Does a tree make a sound when it falls in the forest and there’s nobody around to hear it?
That, I think, summarizes how I feel about them. They can fall all they want. I’m not listening anymore.
