It’s like a hook in my heart that won’t let go and I can always feel it inside of me. It’s the pain I feel every time I think of my Dad. It’s the guilt I feel because I know that moving out of his house isn’t something I can just take back with a “Sorry, I didn’t mean it”. That pain, it goes way deep and I always think about it. I always think about how different things were before, and how different they could have been.
To me, divorce was like a tumor or appendicitis, I knew about it, but I didn’t think it would ever happen to me. Oh, but it did. He moved out during my seventh grade year. It wasn’t the fact that my parents separated that made me sad. I really thought they were going to work things out and we would be one of those “happily divorced” families who still got to together on holidays and had family dinners. It wasn’t until eighth grade when I realized that would never happen. That was when my dad and I started to fight. I finally began to feel the effects of divorce. It was a miserable year and we fought so much that I would sometimes call my mom hysterical, begging her to pick me up. Then it was ninth grade, and that’s when things got bad. I lost a lot of my self-confidence and faith that things would get better. I honestly felt like my dad hated me, and our relationship was hanging on by a thread. And then this year, it all fell apart. I called my best friend crying practically every night, I locked myself in my room every time I was over at his house, and was tearing the skin off my fingertips out of anxiety. So I moved out of his house, permanently. It broke his heart to see me leave. It broke my heart that it had come to that point.
The pain that once caused me so much hurt has resided a little bit, but it’s still there, and it will probably always be. I can still feel it. I feel it when I see a married couple cheering on their kid at a cross country race, or when I go over to a friend’s house and see how nice their dad is to them. I get so jealous of those types of things and wonder why my parents can’t be like that. Why they weren’t like that. It’s the things that I don’t have that I’m most insecure of, but also that I am not defined by. I am not my envy.