My Father, The Stranger
For most of my life, my father was nothing more than a cut out in our family album.
An empty hole.
A reminder of what wasn't there.
I have few childhood memories of him.
In one, we are dancing together in our tiny apartment in Moscow. In another, he is leaving.
My father would disappear for months at a time. Then, unexpectedly, he would come home.
Until, one day, it was our turn to leave.
The year was 1996.
My mother woke me up and told me to pack my belongings. She said we were going on a trip, and the next morning we arrived in our new home, in California.
We never said goodbye to my father.
For my mom, the solution to forget him was simple. She cut his image out of every photograph. But those holes made it harder for me to forget him.
I often wondered what it would have been like to have a father.
I still do.
2013-2014
It took me 15 years to travel across the world to be
standing in the courtyard of his home.
You could say I’ve come home.
But that’s not how it feels.
I was seven years old when I last saw him.
The Soviet Union had long collapsed, and by then so had my family.
We became desperate overnight. I don’t remember much about my father then.
When I would ask my mother about him, she would look at me, disappointed. “Forget him.”
I eventually did.
He told me he had been looking for me.
He opened a suitcase filled with newspaper clippings,
undelivered letters and a shirt for my brother’s future wedding.
Items my grandfather put aside in case he would meet us again one day.
But that was the past.
The man standing across from me didn’t recognize me.
I didn’t recognize him either. I felt out of place.
Not too long ago, my father had another child.
I should be happy for him, but watching him play
with her, feels like a bruise someone keeps pressing.
There are moments when he seems to open up a little.
Like the night he shared his poetry with me, or the evening at the symphony when he snuck in chocolates.
We ate them in the dark.
But then, all at once, he is not there, as if those moments had never even existed.
He's not the only one who is distant.
I often don't know how to behave around my father.
Sometimes he watches me brush my hair or reaches to embrace me.
When he does, I pull away.
I still don't know what he is to me or what I am to him.
I keep looking for him.
I think I always will.