If we never fought, I might have grown in the shelter of your voice, not in the echo of silence. Perhaps I’d have learned to trust approval, instead of teaching myself to live without it.
If we never fought, holidays might have been filled with me in the chair at your table. I might have carried less of the ache, and more of the ease of belonging.
If we never fought,
I might have been a different kind of father
or perhaps simply a man less haunted by the absence of fatherhood.
The boy who was left,
the son who was turned away, the man who never became a father and was not a son.
If we never fought, I might not have learned how to turn sorrow into song or how to carve my life from stone.
The art I carry, the words I write, were born of silence as much as sound. Leaving nothing but a wound that never heals.
Without the wound, I am lost , never to be found.
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