the Crossing

I didn’t know that when I finally forgave my father, it would mean I’d be the one to get the call.

Not from a hospital.
Not the police.

But from his roommate

For most of my life, no contact with my father wasn’t a choice.
It was a condition.

Something that happened the way weather happens
unannounced and outside my control. 

*****

He disappeared the way addicts do:
not all at once, but in fragments.


Missed birthdays.
Phones that never rang.
Addresses that changed without warning.
Promises that dissolved before they could harden into memory.

You don’t decide to stop talking to someone who is already gone.
You just

stop waiting.

*****

As a child, I yearned for a reality where
adults were supposed to be solid.

They were supposed to be findable.
They were supposed to be available.
They were supposed to be listening.
They were supposed to stay.

*****

He moved through my life like a ghost with a body;

present enough to haunt me,
absent enough to never be held accountable.

*****

At nineteen, my world was full of thresholds— finding my voice, becoming someone, discovering the strange grief of independence.

My father existed somewhere on the periphery of that world, a blurry figure I couldn’t want enough to bring into focus.

Sometimes he reached out.
Sometimes I did.

Often, neither of us followed through. 

It wasn’t hostility that kept us apart; it was unreliability. A mutual inability to sustain connection long enough for it to become real.

He was uncontactable in the way addicts often are; not always physically absent, but emotionally unreachable.
You could get close enough to see them,
but not close enough to lean on them.


I learned, as children do, to stop leaning.

*****

By my early twenties, I had stopped narrating our distance as loss. It simply was. I built my life with the quiet understanding that certain people could not be counted on, and that counting on myself was safer. I didn’t rage against the reality. I didn’t grieve loudly. I adjusted.

That adjustment became part of my nervous system.

When we eventually reconnected, it wasn’t because something dramatic had shifted.

It was because, for the first time, I had the internal scaffolding to tolerate disappointment
without collapse.

I could meet him as he was
without hoping he’d become someone else.

I could stand on my side of the bridge
without insisting he meet me halfway.

*****

Forgiveness arrived as realism.

I forgave him the way you forgive weather; not because it apologizes, but because resisting it exhausts you.
I forgave him by letting go of the fantasy that one day he would be reliable,
attuned,
safe.

I forgave him by seeing him clearly and choosing not to look away.

*****

When the call came, it came to me. Because I had answered texts. Because I had crossed back over a bridge I thought I was building only for myself.

His roommate said the words,

“3am…

…overdosed… 

…ambulance…

…morgue.”

Big inhale. Long, slow exhale. 

“Ok.                                                  Thanks Malcolm.”

*****

It was me who got the call.
It was me who called my mother.
It was me who called my sisters.

There is something ancient about being the one who carries news between worlds.
Something priestly.
Something heavy.

I felt it as I dialed each number, my voice steady in a way that surprised me. I felt it as the information land in their bodies, each reaction different but tethered to the same source.

I was the bridge.

Not because I wanted to be.
Because I had built myself to withstand the crossing.

*****

I had been practicing for this my entire life—
learning how to translate chaos,
how to hold conflicting realities,
how to stay present when others dissociated, fell apart, looked away

Forging the bridge didn’t just reconnect me to him;
it made me the connective tissue for everyone else.

It made me the one who could stand in the middle without falling in.

*****

In the days after his death, I thought about how strange it was that absence had shaped me more than presence ever could. That an unreliable adult had taught me how to become reliable. That a man who couldn’t be reached had raised a daughter who knew how to reach others in moments of crisis.