As a child, I remembered everything in ultra luminescence, as if my memories were crystallized after I experienced them for the first time. My childhood home — the one that I spent the first years of my life in — was located in a quiet and small neighborhood. The trees were big and round and held the pigment of the leaves heavily throughout the seasons. Behind my home were train tracks, right beside a small but very popular park that all the children played in until it was supper time. Every night at around what I can only assume was 1 a.m. or near it, a train would pass by. No horn or warning, just the bustling of the carts as the train passed by. This sound quickly became a comfort to me as a child who would stay up and “stargaze” at the glow-in-the-dark wall stickers stuck on my room’s ceiling. The consistency comforted me. I liked the uniformity it gave and the assurance it promised.
In the midst of my adolescence, my parents’ relationship struggled, and I started to notice things that I wasn’t sure were common in “grown-up” relationships. Arguments that made supper time oddly quiet, trips to the store and grandma’s house with only my mom and sister, and hearing my dad come home from work later than expected were all out of the usual routine and it confused me.
It was a year later that my mother told me and my sister to get ready to spend the weekend at grandma’s house. Then the week passed. And the month. Until we moved into a separate apartment not too far from my grandmother’s house. Divorce is such an odd concept to understand at five. You go to school and forget your lunch, so they call your parents — but they don’t ever call my dad, only my mom. Well, my mom is at work an hour into the city. So you get school lunch, yet think, “Why couldn’t my dad just bring me lunch?” It’s frustrating, but you continue eating your peanut butter and jelly sandwich and call it a day. There were more instances that left me feeling this way as I grew older, but luckily with age, I started to learn how to navigate them more naturally.
My father was a free-spirited man. He liked jamming vacations and weekend getaways into his visitations, keeping me and my sister amused like when the lion comes out at the end of a circus act. Yet, it felt disheartening to only ever see this side of him. The show, the random gift-giving, the need to always be doing something, it was fun but distracting.
Into my teen years, I became more aware of these times spent with my father. I was glad to have spent any time with him, but it saddened me to realize the surface level of the relationship he accepted for us. I obviously knew and understood that he loved me and my sister. It just felt like, at times, it was something he only remembered when he was physically with us. When apart, he’d give the occasional call, a “What are you doing this weekend?” shortly followed after with “Ok, well I have to go now, daddy loves you.” It was short but sweet when I missed him.
The thing is, “short and sweet” keeps a relationship at a margin. Only so much “short and sweet” can give you a genuine, sometimes nice but also sometimes ugly realistic connection. For the longest time, I didn’t know if I preferred the picture-perfect idea of my father that he gave us or how I would’ve seen him if he gave us his true, real self.
As an adult, I now just appreciate the time he did give us. Despite the rush, thrill, and disorder of it all, it was an effort to keep us somewhat near. I’m glad to know some of my father, the parts he allowed me into and to be a part of, and although I wish there were more, I’d rather have little than none.
My mother, who never batted an eye at any questions or needs of mine, loved me tenderly, too. Never leaving me with a doubt that she’d drop everything to make sure we were okay. I love my parents, but it took me this long to understand that both of them show and interpret love differently. I value both of my parents for what they so graciously gave me and allowed me to have of them. I treasure every detail, memory, and waking moment I have with them.
And lastly, to the train, who comforted me and still visits me at random moments of my life to remind me that it too comes back around for me, I am eternally grateful.