still, i search for his jeep
on fathers, estrangement, and the things we carry
Note: I decided to archive my post from earlier this week. It didn’t quite match where I’m at. This is by far the most personal thing I’ve shared here, and I’ve only edited it slightly. If this day feels complicated for you too, I hope it meets you gently, if you choose to continue reading.
I wrote the earliest version of this last year as a letter I never sent. I was practicing lyricism by trying to say what hurt in a way that felt clear, even beautiful. I think I found my voice in doing so. But as Father’s Day approached, something in me asked to revisit it. Not just to share what I wrote back then, but to hold space for the years between. To speak from the place I live now, at twenty five, after nearly a decade of estrangement dressed up as “cordial distance.” Maybe this will land with someone else, but I’m okay if it’s just for me.
In absence of your parenthood, I have become remiss.
To engage, or not to engage. That’s the question that’s haunted me for years. But you’re my father, so of course, some part of me still wants to speak nonsensically in hopes that you might scrape off the thick, greasy film clouding your judgment. Just open your eyes, Dad. I am gone entirely.
For two decades, I’ve been trapped in a game of emotional Telephone. Years of whiplash from turning my head, trying to say something true, only to have it come back twisted by your defensiveness. At first, I only whispered to myself, mostly, in that upstairs room with the air vent on the floor. I’d place my ear to the grate and listen to the rage echoing from the kitchen below. The clanging pots. The slamming doors. Her voice — so shrill and irate. I fell into myself then, braiding the lump in my throat into a perfectly tied knot. Only to unravel years later through involuntary illness. Each morning, I’d wake up with a kind of icy-hot numbness crawling up the nape of my neck. I’d choke and heave over nothing but the weight of what wasn’t said. We called it anxiety. We called it panic. But I know now what it really was: grief. Grief for what I never got to have or say.
This knot has tethered itself to every milestone. You missed my high school graduation. College, too. You weren’t there for my first love or its inevitable end. You picked me up from camp or school like it was a job. But sometimes, a joy; when you’d blast The Black Eyed Peas and rock the jeep at each red light. I remember every Christmas Day gas station drop off because you refused to drive to mom’s house. If she hadn’t been your wife, I like to think you might’ve walked me to the door. Maybe even said hello. But even that was too much softness for you to muster.
Do you not understand what elevated voices do to a child? Safety wasn’t offered. It wasn’t built. And that absence has shaped everything since. I am who I am because of who you were not. And I fear I now love men who hurt me and love me all at once. Men who are confused or lost. Men who don’t wake up in their bed of wrongdoings until it’s too late.
Sometimes I imagine a carousel, the kind with mirrors at the center behind the horses and swinging chairs. You’re standing just outside the railing, watching it rotate counterclockwise, one loop every sixteen seconds. The first time, your reflection is whole. The next time, it’s a sliver. The third, it’s warped. With each turn, the image fractures a bit more. I see you now in pieces. I catch glimpses of the man I once knew, but mostly I see what’s been broken.
I’ve longed for the version of you who put on Mission Impossible III for his four-year-old. Who took me to Wegmans to pick out whatever we wanted for dinner and made it feel like magic. I miss the dad who brought me to his photography lectures and let me roam the halls like I was one of the big kids. There was joy in those memories. Small, fleeting joy. But it mattered. I held it close. I hold it close.
And even though you hurt me constantly, I loved you with the kind of reckless, absolute love only a daughter can give. I think, in some way, I still do. I don’t have enough memories like that. I wish I did. I wish I could remember more of just us. Sometimes, I wonder if you remember any of it. Do you ever think of the life you had before all this? Do you miss it? Do you miss me?
You’ve buried yourself in excuses and revisionist history. You don’t know what I eat for breakfast. You don’t know my shoe size. You don’t know the mug I reach for every day. You don’t know what I love to do on Sunday mornings. I’m 25 now, but you haven’t known me since I was 16, really.
You’ve disappointed me in ways that feel unnameable. But this sadness — that is mine. The healing, the rebuilding, the future, that’s mine too. So no, I won’t be finding you in these shattered pieces. But I still wish you’d meet me in the reflection.
So, that’s nearly a decade of fading. Of watching someone forget who I am in real time, as if love could be something a parent just stops practicing. What’s most painful is that he is still very much alive. Still driving a Jeep I always catch myself searching for out of habit, scanning traffic like a child trying to read fate from license plates. At least that hypervigilance lives more on the expressway and less in my body.
There were so many failed attempts at giving him space for accountability. I gave him room to say sorry. To try. To hold an ounce of impact. But narcissistic people can’t metabolize their own reflection. It burns way too hot. And so, they rewrite history. They stay the same while you spend years trying not to become them.
When I moved home, we got coffee once. That was in 2023. I remember thinking maybe this time is different. He didn’t say the words “I’m sorry,” outright but for a brief moment, I felt it surfacing like something unspoken hovering between us, warm and unfamiliar. We both cried.
I still wonder if he misses me. Not in a huge, dramatic way, but in small inconvenient moments. Like, I wonder if he’s ever reminded of his life before everything calcified.
There are versions of him I do remember. We used to go to the movies when I was younger. Marvel, Fast and Furious — you get the idea. It was our thing and I loved it. And even when our relationship was rocky and I was so angry I could barely look at him, we still went to the theater. We'd sit in the dark with popcorn between us. It used to feel fun. But eventually, even that changed. The seats grew colder. The air grew tighter, and so did my chest. We started driving separately. We’d leave silently too, both so aware of the space between us. And I’d sit in the parking lot after, confused about how I felt.
I think what hurts most is that I don’t have many memories of just him and I. Not the kind you replay like home movies. Most of them feel like background noise, cut off before the plot could land. And now, when I see fathers and daughters together, it makes me feel like I missed the completion of a language everyone else was taught. One where you’re allowed to ask for softness. One where your existence was never conditional.
What surprised me is that in writing this, what surfaced wasn’t rage, but something more observant. A neutral kind of ache. For the past, for the person he once was, and for the version of us that never got to be.
I wrote him this letter. I said, “I am tired of protecting your feelings by burying mine.” I said, “You do not know me. You don’t know how I take my coffee. You don’t know the softness I’ve learned to give myself. You don’t know the years you missed.” I wrote that I am who I am because of who he was not. And even now those words still might ring true.
And yet, I still search for his Jeep.
I still wonder if he remembers the sound of my voice.
I still love action movies.
💌
I love you