To my father,

It was one of the last times we ever had an extensive conversation. You had the news radio on blast in your car. Tim Hardaway had just revealed his homophobia to the country and the first words of wisdom you shared were “… it’s not that he thought it; it’s that he said it aloud.” You went on to dig deeper into the caverns of bigotry before I abruptly asked you how long it’d take before we got to Ft. Lauderdale International Airport. I had ridden on the passenger side of your car – typically Camrys – on average once a year, when you mostly filled the air with jazz, kompa, and meanderings about the ways of the world. You knew Brooklyn, Manhattan, Miami, and Ft. Lauderdale well enough to ignore the roads for long junctures as you hoped to remind your third child that you were his – my – father.

As a boy, I listened with hopes that you would return. As an adolescent, I listened for whatever keys you had for kindling a confidence that seemed first-nature to you and tertiary at best for me. As a young adult, I uncovered that I had aged quicker than I wanted to, through bruises, humiliation, and restraint. I had already grown angry with you through those years, resenting that our phone rang incessantly from family friends, but rarely had you on the other end. Your barely-annual visits featured those protracted journeys to whichever spot that was, the drop-off to my grandmother’s house or your significant other’s house, and agony that the man I exalted so often would leave me alone for hours on end. I thought I’d get the man whose deep gaze held the camera and expansive arms held the toddler me, who held an alligator in a trench coat named after you.

All so you could tell people you spent time with me.

On one of those occasions, I manifested my anger at you by telling my grandmother in front of the whole family that her rice and beans were too spicy. They weren’t. I said it in English. Everyone else at the table spoke Kreyol. The gasps and mutes needed no translation. My retort alarmed you still, to the point where you dropped your utensils, pulled me into your car, and drove me back directly to my mom’s apartment on Clinton St. You spent the vast majority of that ride scolding me: “If you just waited another day, we would have gone to Toys R’ Us, but you ruined it …” I waited years for you. Was my outburst such that grace couldn’t be granted me another few hours, or was it another ruse?

I get all my own things now, by the way. We good.

You came to me this morning, appearing somewhere between the new wrinkle on my forehead and my raspy morning voice. I never allowed you to occupy my son’s consciousness. He knows you passed away. A few months before you died in 2012, you called, first to berate me for not presenting him to you, as if. As if I didn’t have to find complicated father figures in strangers, priests, and professors. As if my stepfather’s abusive reign didn’t harden me to the idea of home. As if I didn’t start seeing the legacy of slavery and the remnants of this behavior in the justification of beating one’s own progeny, acquired or otherwise. As if I would ever let you disappoint my son with your disappearances, too. And then you asked to speak to my mother. I was mostly silent in response. You weren’t healthy, but you never betrayed that. I had nothing to say to you until I went to your funeral a few months after that call, at peace with the person you were to me and my seven (?) siblings from five different women.

I could never find peace until I let you and your relentless self rest.

Your spirit was conjured in a celebration for dads at my son’s school, too. Dozens of fathers flooded the Harlem block in parade form for their children. You might have derided the showing of predominantly Black and Brown men as effeminate or you might have found camaraderie in a space rife with testosterone, wood-based colognes, and distinct pan-African accents. As a youth, after another beating session with the hellraiser who would give me my only brethren from my mother’s side, I swore upon my life that I would be the father I never had. I envied the relationship you had with some of my siblings in Miami, and learned to let go of the jealousy after spending weeks in their home.

I wanted so desperately to have you in my life because it was the closest I’d come to actually being you.

I feel you looking back at me when my bloodshot eyes have had enough of being open. I’m thanking you as I embrace my son tightly, as I kiss his cheeks and forehead, as I console him of his worries. I shake my free hand of you as I hold my son’s on the other. I hurt for the children who’ve drawn eye contact me, whose fathers are more like you with me and whose fathers are more like me with mine, and who are absent all the same. I learned that I must own the reserves of my own happiness and not leave it up to anyone else, no matter how deeply connected. I know you left me gifts, some of which keep revealing themselves in my interactions with others.

I’m also attuned to the limits of my resilience for people I love.

It’s like that time you had to drive from deep in Brooklyn to the Lower East Side because I couldn’t stand getting my shots with a baby needle. My mom and stepfather held me down but to no avail. When you came in and the ounces of my blood finally made it into the nurse’s tubes for testing, I sat quietly, listening to three adults hoping they’d never have to go through that again. I learned to bleed privately. I learned the routines of what to do should someone else bleed in front of me. I took the transfusion of this moment so I wouldn’t have to feel that.

Maybe you knew the whole time that, as imperfect as you were, I’d have to know you so I could know myself. I know me now.