tonight, tommy read me a speech that he's giving this weekend at an emmaus retreat. part of it was a story about how he always used to be angry at his dad when he was younger and even hated him, and only now started to realize that who his dad is as a person. apparently part of the retreat is that when the kids get there they get letters their parents have written for them, and the one tommy's dad wrote for him when he went made him break down and cry because it made him realize how much his dad loved him. i told him he was very lucky to have reached that point, especially at this age....and i suddenly really wanted to cry, but i didn't feel like breaking into tears in the hallway.

it always hurts to hear about the turning points other people have with their parents, at various stages in their lives. especially with their fathers. it just drives home for the millionth time that i will never have that. our relationship ended with the anger, with the arguing, with the complete lack of understanding. our relationship ended on the floor of my parents' bedroom, or at least his half of it did, because i'm still here, i'm still thinking about him and wishing....i wish so many things, none of them possible. i wanted to tell tommy that i hoped that he took that letter from his dad and put it somewhere where he will always have it, no matter what happens. i didn't think i could say it without crying. i wonder if he knows that i would give almost anything to have a letter like that from my dad...and now i'm crying, and i think i'm waking wendy up.

the argument could be made that what i can't have with my dad i can always have with my mom, but i don't know. i can talk to my mom, i know she's proud of me, i understand her as a person much more than i did four years ago, much more than i ever understood my dad. but, for better or for worse, my dad was the most powerful influence in my life. we were alike, we made each other laugh. my mom and i are not that similar....i don't know, i can't help it. there's just this huge sense in me that if things could have been put right, with everything, if somehow i could have flashed forward to some utopian future, what a relationship we might have had! but there's no use daydreaming about that, is there.

how ironic that just the other day i was musing about how i haven't been thinking about him much since his anniversary. i actually remember thinking that i hadn't cried in a while--well i'm making up for lost time now. how utterly ironic that they thought there was something wrong with me, after he died, because no one ever saw me cry. i barely ever cried, for a few years. maybe it's because i've gained perspective; i see it all from so many angles now. back then i had just lost a father figure whom i often disliked, which is bad enough in itself, but four years later he's become so much more, full of depth and history and all the things i never had a chance to know. four years later i'm still discovering what i lost that day, and with every revelation i grieve more and more for what i'll never have. loss is supposed to grow dimmer over the years, but for me it seems to grow more acute, especially on nights like tonight, when i hear the happiness in the voice of someone who has reached a milestone with their dad that i can never hope to achieve, in this life.

and the final irony of all this? i start crying on the night we run out of tissues. beautiful.

i want to write but i don't know what to say. how do you turn tears into words?