Say the three words

Something traumatic happened to me when I was 13.

I didn't have the skills or experience to be able to share it with anyone at the time.

So I held onto it. I obsessed over it, as if that would beat it into submission. But it only made it denser and heavier.

And as time and life went on, my feet lifted off the ground less and less.

I sat alone a lot with the street lights pouring in through the windows one night, illuminating me, alone with my thoughts, smoking weed to keep them bay.

My best friend encouraged me to speak with my dad. Ten years later, my best friend encouraged me to speak with my dad.

And finally, after another bender, I got off of the couch and realized I could. I realized I needed to.

So I left a message for my father that day, a voice note on his phone: "Hey dad, it's been a long time. But I just wanted to say that I think we can help each other. I think there are a lot of things that have gone unsaid over the year. We could say them," I said and pressed send.

He replied the next day: "Let me know when."

"End of September?" I messaged back.

He booked his flights.

And later, the night before he was set to arrive, I was scared.

I knew where I wanted to get to: telling him how I felt about his divorce from my mother when I was 13. About how he turned out (to me) to be gay. How he and my mother threatened each other. How I was in the middle of it all I felt like.

"Where do you want to start?" he asked me sitting over breakfast.

"How was the divorce for you?" I asked him, not knowing where to start.

"Horrible," he said, "but how about I start earlier?"

He told me stories that shaped him over the years. Being a kid at the grave of his uncle and listening to his grand mother tell his father that it should have been him lying there. He told me about his father, locked away in his study, ignoring him crying at his door. He told me about being involved with men and women as a teenager. He told me about his marriage to my mom and their conversations.

The day slipped into night. We went to dinner.

When we arrived at the divorce. "I know I hurt you," he said. I had never heard him acknowledge this before.

"I felt devastated and abandoned," I said looking away. "I was angry."

He looked at me and cried. "I wish I could hug you and take all your pain away."

Even though it was too late for my younger self to hear, I could hear it now, and in a weird way, he did.

And that was how my decades of anger ended—with a few words.

It always does.

It's never too late to get off the couch and say the three words.