A letter

So, this is what I had said I would post earlier - it took me a bit to decide I wanted to share it.  I began writing this on the 17th and finished on the 18th.  Feel free to comment as you please.

    Today is of those we aptly call "difficult".  It's a fair catch-all term to jump to.  I'm not sure just what to call today.  To find a word - the right word - to call today is to render unto paper what for now cruises about the air that surrounds me.  And the white of this sheet is too harsh for me.  I don't think I want to find the right word.  To find that word would be as it would to outwardly acknowledge the squirming, hideous difference between what I believed yesterday and what I know to be true today.
    I miss you, dad.  And I love you.  I still hold dear the memories we made together, with family, and among friends.  I am sorry that I have to do this.
    With platitudes familiar to all of us in tact - there's a time in a boy's life when he must become a man.  For me, that time was 6 years ago.  It was too soon for me.  I wasn't ready, I didn't know what it meant to be a man.  I was lost and afraid.  I was still just a damn boy, after all.  Gawd, if I could have been, I would have been.  With hindsight as my witness, I just didn't know who I was supposed to be.  The fact begs a question - who's fault is that?
    It's your fault, dad.  I'm really sorry, but it's your fault.  You didn't teach me how to be a man.  You just showed me and acted like being like you were was so easy that I should be able to just do it too.  But god be damned if I could.  It was like trying to be God.  I hated it.  I hated myself for failing at it.  And that was the worst pain I can ever remember feeling.  A chronic, shredding vulgarity at the cellular level.  Like my own skin was at war with itself.  And I forgive you for that.  You gave what you had time to give.  And I can't hold a grudge against a dead man with tripping over my own foot with my hands tied behind my back.
    Until recently, I dared not speak a word - even think a thought - that might stain my airbrushed image of who you were, what we had, and what that means to me.  But here it is on the table.  I'm blaming you because the only other conceivable conspirator is me and I can't be blamed for not becoming what I haven't been equipped to become.  Again, I say to you, I am sorry.  But sorry can't mend this seam without forgiveness.  What I need from you is forgiveness.  But you are not here to give it.
    So today is the day I forgive myself for being deceived.  I spent the last six years searching for tablets of stone that you never wrote.  I kept following a map for which I hadn't a key.  Chasing the dying sunset only to spit on my own boots in the darkness that I found.  Over and over again.  IMAGINE a loneliness and a puzzlement so loaded and dripping with desire to be rid of it.  To feel with all of your being that it's only you to blame.  And that if you can not fix it, that it is you alone who has failed and everyone was watching.
    In this moment of reflection, I get a rather Christ-like feeling for finding enough warmth to forgive such treason.  But it's not as chesty as it sounds.  I tire of tarnishing your gilded portrait.  It's okay now that you can't forgive me because I've become a man of my own vision with a spirit singed and still smoking but yet in tact and for that great accomplishment, I can be proud of myself.  I am ready to grant myself permission to be forgiven by the only one of us left standing - myself.
    For six years, I traveled the states seeking wisdom.  I thought I'd found it at many stops along the way. At the bottoms of bottles, the ends of plastic tubes, the butts of cigarettes, I found what I then deemed an acceptable substitute for manhood.  And also I found an enduring mechanism for avoidance that was working for me, I thought.  Of all these mistakes I have formed a messy pile marked for the funeral pyre.  Though I am quite sure that mistakes will continue to be made, I will not make the same mistakes again. I am ready for the challenges that peer at me from down the road.  And I am ready to do the right thing when I come upon them.  And that's how I know I've become a man.  I am no longer a boy.  No longer your boy.  I am a man now, dad.  And I don't need your approval anymore because I have my own.  I have created for myself a short lifetime of varied experiences from which I draw the wisdom that guides my actions and I have found success!  Oh, what a feeling!  To know that I have built myself, from spare parts picked off the floors, into a real hard-working, driven, loving, and gentle man!  I can now walk comfortably, glancing down and shaking my head with a smile when I recognize the dried saliva on my steel toes.  I'm not going to wipe it off. I want to remember what it took for me to become who I am.  Because unlike you dad, I'm going to give that experience to my son.  And I thank you for helping me to see the importance of that.  Your dad died when you were young - you were never taught to be a man, either.  But now, I'm going to break the cycle.  There will not be another broken man in the chain.  Because you gave me a reason to find the truth and I'm going to keep passing it along.
    So rest easy, dad.  Know that all the good you did is recognized and that all the wrongs are forgiven.

    Be proud, dad - your boy's become a man.

-R.K.M.