I hate you for leaving me!

I said this as I smashed my father’s burial portrait.

Glass splintered across the floor, jagged reflections of my rage scattered under my feet. My breath hitched, chest heaving, but the room was silent. Even the mourners in the living room had stopped whispering, their pity-laced murmurs replaced with a different judgement. “What kind of daughter does this at her father’s funeral?”

My kind!

The kind that was left at a bus stop the day she failed her national exams.

I was fifteen. I remember gripping my results in trembling hands, scanning the bold letters that spelled out my failure, my body frozen in shame. He had said nothing when he saw me. Just looked at the paper, exhaled sharply, and turned away. No words. No anger. No reassurance. He walked. And I waited, hoping he’d turn back, that he’d change his mind, that he’d see me.

He never did.

He always left.

And now, even in death, he has abandoned me again.

I should write a tribute, but what is there to say? That my father was a man of silence? That I spent my childhood chasing his approval like a stray dog begging for scraps?- I wanted the bread not the crumbs unlike the woman in the bible but maybe I was being greedy. That every time I tried to hold onto him, he slipped through my fingers like sand?

Do I even deserve to mourn him?

Because my hands feel bloody.

He always left me with pain-even in death.

I hear the murmurs.

“She hasn’t even shed a tear”.

“Did she even love him?”

Hypocrisy!

The same people whispering now were the ones who told me not to end up like him. “Don’t be cold. Don’t be closed off. Don’t be your father”.

Now, they mourn him like he was a saint. Like his absence in my life never existed.

My mother told me once that love is a language. Some people say it loud, others whisper it in small gestures, and some…never say it at all. My father was the latter.

And I hated him for it.

But hate is a mask for grief, isn’t it? And grief is love with nowhere to go.

I need air.

I need to get out of this house, away from the judging eyes, away from the expectations that I will suddenly become the daughter he deserved.

I walk.

And I don’t stop until I reach him.

The earth is fresh, unsettled like me.

I kneel. Not because I want to, but because my legs feel like they will give way.

And then, I do something I haven’t done in years.

I speak to him.

“You were a coward”.

The wind howls in response.

“You never fought for me”.

Distant thunder rumbles.

“ You never even tried”

A sharp gust of wind blows dust into my eyes, blinding me for a second. But maybe that’s what I need- to not see, to not feel, to not be.

I exhale. A deep, shuddering breath that carries years of weight.

“But maybe…” My voice cracks. “Maybe I was a coward, too”

I close my eyes.

I let the memories come.

The thing about grief is that it rewrites history, makes you see things you ignored before. And now, in the silence of the graveyard, I remember things I had long forgotten.

Like how, when I was eight, I fell off my bike and scraped my knee. I remember how my father, a man who never comforted with words, carried me home. His grip was firm, his silence loud, but I remember the way his fingers trembled as he cleaned my wound.

Or how, when I was twelve, he came home one evening and wordlessly handed me a book. ‘Why You Act The Way You Do’. No explanation. No “I thought you’d like this”. Just a book placed on my desk. I didn’t understand then. I do now. It was his way of telling me about him. His personality. About me too. My personality. He wanted us to understand each other. It didn’t make sense then. It does now.

Or the day I failed my exams. I only remember the way he walked away. I don’t remember the envelope of money I found in my drawer a week later, enough to pay for retakes. He never said a word about it.

Love is a language.

And maybe I was too angry to learn his dialect.

I press my forehead to the cold headstone.

“I hated you for the way you loved me”.

Silence

“I wanted the kind of love they show in movies. Big, loud, undeniable. But you…you loved in small things. In quiet ways”.

But why? Why did he love in such a silent way? Dots start to connect. To make meaning of why. To give an answer to my long asked question. The answer lies in his past. He was raised by a man who saw emotions as weakness, who punished tenderness and rewarded restraint. I witnessed this when momma was in a 12-hour labour of my younger brother. Father was crippled with fear that he might lose the only human who understood his love dialect. He called grandpops and he got a shouting to prepare for the worst and stop fretting. After that day, they became distant. We also became more distant. My grandpops was cold, and my father had learned from him. It was all he knew.

He tried, in his own way, to be different, but breaking out of a mold takes more than just desire- it takes courage. And maybe, just maybe, my father never found the strength to fight his own upbringing. He let it shape him, let it dictate the kind of man he became. Even as an adult, he remained bound by his past. But there is a stage you get to in life where you are no longer just a product of your background or how you were raised. At that stage, you are solely responsible for who you are. And my father…he chose. He chose silence. And I hate him for it. But layered beneath that hate is something like the opposite of hate.

I exhale, letting my fingers trace the engraved letters of his name.

“I thought you never fought for me”. I swallow hard.

 “But maybe…maybe you did. Maybe silence was your battlefield. Maybe the world had beaten the words out of you before you could give them to me”.

Tears slip down my cheeks.

“I just wish you had tried a little harder.”

My voice breaks, but I let it. Because this is my tribute. This is my confession.

“I didn’t tell you this when you were alive. I should have.”

I place my hand over the dirt, feeling the weight of absence.

“But I loved you, too.”

The words feel foreign. They feel stolen. But they are mine. And I will not let them get unheard.

I rise.

The sun is setting, casting gold over the graveyard.

I inhale, filling my lungs with something lighter than grief.

I turn to leave, but before I go, I say the only thing that matters.

“Rest well, Dad.”

Because some love confessions are made only at the grave.

And maybe, just maybe, that is better than a lifetime of unsaid words.

#Februarycontest