when i am 11 years old my father tells me
that the parking lot smells a lot like marijuana
to say that i am scandalized would be
an understatement.
you see
i was the prude love child of my middle school's
‘DARE’ program
which means that i was taught from a very
young age that
the minute you consume
drugs you become a very very
bad, bad person
so when my father insinuates that he knows
this smell
i judge him to be a evil man
and tell him to confess immediately
or i am running away from home!
he laughs, and says
“the things you will never know about my
past”
i have never asked my father who he dated
before my mother.
i have never asked him about his first kiss.
i do not know what he hoped his life would
look like
and whether or not that came true.
you see there is this thing that happens
when you call someone a father
he ceases to become a person and instead becomes
a
punch line
for everything that you hate about yourself
he becomes a parable
as if on that day two new people are born
everything he is in this moment is now history
his story
there is this thing that happens when you
are trans
where you know you are not a man because
you know you are not your father's son
and the moment you tell him this
he becomes everything you are running away
from
so in this way being trans is another way
of saying
“i am running away from home”
i have never asked my father what it was like
to become history
to watch thirty years of memory
coil inside his gut
so that every time he laughed
you remember what it felt like
to be young again
. . .
there is a VCR tape in the living room drawer
fast forward to the scene where a man who
would've
looked like me
if i hadn't run away from my father
walks out next to a woman radiant enough to
be the sunshine when i first opened my eyes
this is my parents wedding video
in this shot
my father’s best friend tells him that he
can no longer be a rebel
now that he’s a married man
this is how i discover that my father used
to a rebel
when i meet his friends from college they
say
that he spent most of his time hanging out
with a man named karl marx
and a dream of a decolonized india
they tell me i look just like him
and i want to correct them say no i’m not
a man
i mean i’m not that man
my father laughs at me in the video the same
way
he will fifteen years later in a parking lot
the same way he laughs when I'm back home
and use words like ‘revolution’ and ‘now’
and he tells me that we need incremental change
so of course i accuse him of being middle
class liberal
who's come to care more about his private
property
more than he has his people
and he tells me
that there is this thing that happens
when you grow older and begin to
recognize that you are no longer invincible
which is i think my father’s way of finally
admitting
that he was never invincible
that his hands were so sweaty from being afraid
of
all of the ways that i began to look just
him
that he could never quite
hold on to me
which is i think my father’s way of finally
admitting
there are things i had to give up
in order to have you
i gained the confidence to yell on the streets
because i learned early on how to fight my
father
i have been shouting at him for the past six
years
and calling it a relationship instead of a
riot
because maybe that’s my way of convincing
myself that
i see myself in the flames
and maybe
that makes all of the difference.
