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Sunday, April 16, 2006

Déja Vu

This evening, I witnessed a little girl, standing in her driveway, saying goodbye to her father. Daddy carried her down the sidewalk and set her on her feet in the driveway, promising that he'd see her later. "Maybe tomorrow," he said. He rolled down the window of the little black truck that he was driving and pulls out of the driveway. The young girl broke her position of standing back and waving to run up to the driver's side door. She held onto the window and jumped up and down so Dad would listen to her. "Well, I can come back later tonight if you want." Upon hearing these words, the girl became excited once again and went back to standing and waving in her driveway. He pulled away, glancing back at the little girl multiple times in his rear view mirror as he left. All the motion leaves the girl as she does the same, including the animated wave of her hand. As the pick-up rounds the corner, out of the little girl's sight, she waved one last feeble wave, then turned around to go back inside.
Whether these two characters knew it or not, they had just re-enacted a dream, a nightmare that consumed me as a child. In the dream, however, I was the little girl and instead of happily waving, I screamed and cried, begging him not to leave with my grandma, and he was a heartless father who never said anything, never returned. I look at myself today, and the irony of what I see compared to that dream fails to escape me.
The cynic in me knows that when this girl grows up, her father will fall from that pedestal that she has him on, letting her down hard like mine did. Their relationship shows a lot of similarities to that of mine with my father, especially when I was that age. I've come to expect a lot less of him than I did then. And yet there's another part of me that has hope for the two. I guess that is the small side of me that hopes that my father will someday change.
That black pick-up never returned this evening.

1 comments:

Jeff C. said...

Wow, that's depressing as hell.