Act 2, Scene 5

MELI

If there’s something that can without fail piss me off is the way so freely assume that I hated my father.

I know; we were always fighting. All the time we were fighting, but never once did either of us want the other to lose.

My mother once explained to me when I was  very young that fighting was the only way Dad had ever learned to interact with the world, it was his first language.

Believe me, you don’t need to tell me that there are healthier father-daughter relationships, but this is the one I got and there’s nothing to do about it; you don’t get a second father.

And anyways, he always went easy, always let me win. No matter how many times he’d scold and shout for me to get out of the house and to never return for I was ruining my life and hanging out with a bunch of bums, and that he had had enough and this time I had pushed him too hard and so and and so forth –no matter all that stuff, I would always find him back home, watching some old John Wayne flick, waiting for me to join him.

I did not hate my dad.

The people who would tell you that I did were those who actually had a problem with him, the sycophants and the vultures that hung around the house calling themselves our friends. Empty folk, who believe themselves the Anointed. They could never wrap their heads around someone beneath them rising to their level and even further beyond instead of simply being born in it. The only kind of love these people have on offer is always conditional, and I have never had any use for conditional love. 

Now, at my 50s, I think my dad was of the same mind, that’s why he would cut me loose and always take me back, he just needed to see if my love for him really was unconditional, to see that I’d come back out of my own volition.

That’s why, even though I know that there was nothing I could do, even though the chance had been taken away from me, I still feel guilty that I came back home too late for him.

I wanted Fede outside with me during this time, so I have no idea what my head looked like then.

            END OF SCENE