Personal Statement

What would the world be like if we started and ended relationships like a college application?

Imagine having to fill out a yearly set of forms (like taxes) to remain friends, family, or coworkers. You'd have to highlight all of your best qualities showcasing your social, emotional, and dependable nature. Then include an essay on why the position should be yours and not someone else's, how you can make the other person's life better, and what your commitment to them would be. Surely it would have to be good because the applicant pool would be competitive, and if you were declined you'd have to spend the next year working harder on your worthiness without having the other person in your life. Sorry son, you just sucked at being a son last year. Better luck next year!

Radical, I know. Don't worry; I don't plan on enacting this law anytime soon. I'm just sitting here at the computer, in the not so early hours of morning, while my father eats something he microwaved from a can that resembles my imagination's idea of baby puke. I wasn't offered any. Not a surprise. Our relationship has never been one of nurturance. The earliest memory I have of him involves me sobbing for my life over our home's grate heater while my mother was at the hospital with my brother and his appendicitis.

I was three years old at the time, and I felt completely abandoned being left alone with this man who stayed seated in his red easy chair and never dropped the newspaper he was reading to comfort me. I screamed for my mother again and again with tears pouring down my face. Nothing. This may have been the first time I felt resentment. I'm not sure. It was an ugly feeling. Ever since then the role my father has played has pretty much remained the same. Plenty a time he was the reason for my tears with his Marine volume and Freddy Kreuger facial contortions while screaming. Surely, if life were as simple as an application process, we'd have simply bid adeu a long time ago and never looked back. Onward and upward. There would be no drama, just the easiest form of denial one could accept, the literal.