Poll in the side-bar...

*big scared eyes*

... help me?

love,
Caroline

psstt: workshop emilea's poem below.

an experiment in revealing too much

Because you guys are all awful and had to choose the one I didn't really want to put up here, here is part of a sort of essay-like thing I wrote about seeing my dad last weekend. It's definitely not finished and barely even edited in the slightest, and it was hard for me to put it up here, but I kind of want to know what you think about it. It's my first go at non-fiction, and I'm almost thinking it's what I'm sending in. It's the closest I have to a short-story. ~Heather


My stomach rolled and my eyes burned in the heat outside of the restaurant, but that couldn't be the only reason. Some credit was due to why I was there.

I kept replaying the one memory I had of him in my mind.

I was just a little thing, couldn't have been much older than two and running through his house (I couldn't call it mine, I never belonged to or with him) in a maze of white. We had covered the entire hall, living room, and bedroom with light-colored sheets and the sunlight shone trough, illuminating the world to my innocent blue eyes. Just faintly, I could hear my cousin laughing softly as she hid among the labyrinth and I tried to find her.

It was a game, you see. While he just sat there in a chair amidst the cloth walls, not telling a soul where the others hid, someone would run off and hide.

But they were always found or came out when the seeker was defeated enough to call "olly-olly-oxen free!"

He wasn't and didn't. Not for over ten years.

I could have called olly-olly-oxen free all my life if I had wanted to. Instead I just held that picture in a wallet under my mattress for nearly five years, only pulling it out if I had a bad dream and knew Amy was a sleep and wouldn't be woken by my ever-handy flashlight. Instead, I spent days forming elaborate stories of where he was and who he was with and what their names were and why he hadn't taken me. Instead, I cried every year on my birthday, wishing that I had two parents to celebrate with as opposed to just the one.

Then that call came last November and I ended up there at that restaurant, my stomach rolling and eyes burning. It took almost a full year to happen, but it did.

"I do not want to be here," my oldest sister, Natasha said.

"I don't either," Amy agreed.

They both looked at me. I shook my head and picked at my fingernails. "No."

But we were, all of us, ready to re-meet our father, or as Natasha liked to call him, the sperm-donor. When she first asked me about lunch with him, she'd said "The sperm-donor called. He wants to see us." She didn't even feel the need to pretend like she cared.

I cared, but I wasn't lying. I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to have to be there. I didn't want to have to get to know my own father.

We had invited Amy's boyfriend, Robert, along as a sort of buffer. He suggested we wait inside where it wasn't so hot. So we did. They seated us at our reserved table and arguing ensued. Amy immediately snagged the inside corner of the booth side, Robert sliding in next to her, and Natasha took the same end on the chair side. The only place for me was either by Natasha or Robert, both of which would leave me with the possibility of sitting next to him. I asked please would they sit on the other side of me and didn't they realize that I was not going to sit next to him and couldn't Natasha just handle maybe sitting across from him because it had to be better than next to him.

They said no.


P.S. Anna (where are you, Anna??????), comment on Caroline's post, just there↓