Fawnlight & Footnotes

There are whole years of my life where you appear as only flickers – a silhouette in a doorway, a shadow crossing a room, a voice blurred at the edges. It’s strange how someone can be both unforgettable and barely there. How a father can exist like a half-drawn figure: part memory, part myth, part absence.

Sometimes I try to recall the sound of your footsteps, the exact weight of them, the way the floorboards would or wouldn’t creak depending on who you were that day. But all I get are impressions. Echoes. A feeling in my chest that tightens like a warning.

I miss you in the most inconvenient ways. In the moments I wish I had someone to call. In the quiet before sleep, when the world gets too soft to hold all the things I never got to say. I miss the version of you I invented – the protector, the anchor, the steady Godlike figure children carve from hope alone. But I’ve come to know I was grieving the fantasy long before I ever lost the man.

Your love, and it was love, was brittle. The kind that snapped under pressure. The kind that shrank from responsibility. The kind that made me feel like asking for comfort was the same as asking for too much.

Some days, you held me like I was a promise. Other days, I was an afterthought, an interruption, a responsibility that you wished you could set down without guilt. And you did. Eventually, you did.

Growing up with you felt like learning to breathe underwater – possible, but only if I stayed very still. Only if I didn’t disturb the surface. Only if I pretended not to notice as you drifted further every year, as though loving me required a strength you never learned to hold.

Your mind was a living storm – paranoia swirling, hallucinations clawing through your days, gambling filling the gaps where your heart should’ve been. I didn’t know then that you were drowning. I didn’t know then that I would inherit the same tide. But even drowning people reach for something. You didn’t reach for me..

And then came the version of you that belonged to someone else. A ready-made family where you could pretend you were whole. Where you didn’t have to confront the daughter whose mind was beginning to fracture in all the ways yours once did.

I keep replaying the moment I first told you I was afraid of myself – that the thoughts were slipping sideways, that shadows were no longer just shadows, that I was shrinking, disappearing, unravelling. I thought that you would understand. I thought the broken recognise the broken.

But you stepped back. Then further. Then further again, until the distance became permanent.

And Gods, the rage that leaves behind. Rage that tastes metallic. Rage that sits behind my ribs like a trapped animal. Because you knew. You knew what this illness could take from a person, how it could twist the inside of a mind until everything becomes sharp and trembling. And still, you chose comfort over responsibility. Still, you chose them over me.

I hate how my heart defends you even now. How it whispers excuses in the dark. How the child in me still believes you might come back – not as you are, but as you’re supposed to be.

The girl inside me…she’s stubborn. She’s still the kind of girl who thinks that you’ll show up when it matters. She still waits by imaginary windows, still thinks she hears you in the garden humming, still imagines you walking in with open arms and apologies that taste like truth.

But I am not that girl anymore. I am the woman who has learned to father herself in all the ways you fell short. I am the one who bandages the wounds you left behind and whispers that I am not too much, not too broken, not too difficult to stay for.

Healing from you feels like trying to stitch together a map with missing pieces. A long, patient reconstruction of everything you cracked. I am learning not to chase people who choose the door. Learning that abandoning your child says everything about you and nothing about her. Learning that love is not proven by who we lose, but by who stays to witness our becoming.

Some nights, though…some nights I miss you with a brutality that almost knocks the breath out of me. Miss the imagined version of us that never had a chance to exist. Miss the tenderness we never grew into. Miss the safety I pretended you gave me.

And on those nights, when the ache swells too big for my chest, and the world gets too quiet, I end up circling back to the same truth – cold, simple, unchanging.

You didn’t have to love me perfectly. You just had to stay. And you couldn’t even do that.