I don’t remember the first time my father abandoned me. I was too young—barely two, a toddler, a memory trapped in the bodies of others who were there to witness it. My mother told me later, in bits and pieces, how he packed up and walked out, how he chose himself over the child he had brought into this world. I imagine it now, though I never really could picture his face then—was he ashamed? Relieved? Did he hesitate before shutting the door, or was he already gone before it even clicked shut?
I like to think there was a flicker of guilt, a moment where he considered the weight of what he was doing. But the truth is, men like him don’t feel the weight. They don’t carry things like that. They set them down, walk away, and never look back.
He left, and my mother was left holding the pieces, already broken in her own ways, already fighting demons that had nothing to do with me. It was the first lesson I learned about my father: he knew how to walk away.
And he did it again.
By fifteen, I was an uninvited guest in his house, tolerated but never welcomed. I wasn’t his son; I was an obligation, a condition of some past mistake that he had to check off. His new wife, the woman who sat at the center of his world, didn’t like me, didn’t want me there. I could see it in the way she avoided my eyes, in the way her lips thinned whenever I entered the room.
She wanted me out.
And because my father’s backbone had long since been replaced with something soft and pliable, he gave her what she wanted. He didn’t say, I love you, but this is my son. He stays. He didn’t say, He’s blood, and blood doesn’t get thrown away. He said, The house is made of rules, and if you break them, you can’t live here.
Rules.
Rules, from a man who never followed them himself. Rules, from a father who had never given a damn about raising me, who had spent years looking the other way while his son learned the hard way what it meant to be alone.
So I was out. Again.
It was different at fifteen, though. At two, I had no choice. At fifteen, I knew what was happening. I felt it. I carried it.
And I carried it again at sixteen.
I tried to make it work. I did. I followed the rules, I played along, I kept my head down. But when a woman wants you gone, you don’t stand a chance. She turned every moment into a weapon, twisting reality until my father saw what she wanted him to see—a problem. A disruption. A stain on their perfect little life.
And he chose her. Again.
There’s a specific kind of pain that comes from being discarded by the man who should be your protector. It isn’t loud or sudden like a slap across the face. It’s slow, creeping, like rot spreading through the foundation of a house. You don’t see it at first. You don’t even feel it, not really. Not until one day you realize the ground beneath you is hollow, that the walls are crumbling, that the place you once called home was never built to last.
He never asked where I went. Never called. Never wondered if I had a bed to sleep in, if I was safe, if I had food.
What kind of man does that?
A coward.
A man who takes the easy way every time, who puts his own comfort above everything else. A man who lets his wife dictate who matters and who doesn’t. A man who signs the papers to pull his own son out of school and thinks nothing of it. A man who hears the door shut behind his child for the third time and doesn’t even flinch.
I used to wonder if he ever thought about me, if there were nights when he lay awake and felt something gnaw at him, something ugly and unavoidable.
But I don’t wonder anymore.
Because men like him don’t carry the weight.
They set it down.
They walk away.
And they never look back.
