emancipation from fathers and ghosts

I did not expect to have such a strong relationship with my dad after his death. Sometimes I can forget he is no longer physically here because his presence remains so strong in my daily life.

I asked my therapist, do you believe in ghosts? My dad was everywhere during the week of Halloween, one degree away from physically present. I can sense him when he’s around. Sometimes it’s comforting. Most times, I feel an unease followed by guilt. I dreamed he abused me again and still two days after, I wanted to crawl out of my skin from discomfort. He was everywhere, his energy desperately seeking forgiveness, absolution. It was suffocating. I sat on my couch, and I said aloud I need you to leave me alone right now. It is too much to have you here. I cannot have you around after that dream. My eyes pooled with tears. Establishing myself in juxtaposition to him is to swim upstream and leave him to drown.

There is a new thread I have been unspooling since that night. A new layer revealed. All of my attempts to leave home were attempts to gain freedom, that I knew. But I did not quite understand the feeling I was looking to be freed from. Now, I am starting to sense into it more. A heaviness on my chest, the inability to complete a full inhale, gas pedal to the floor but the e-brake is on, needing to scream, run, punch, cry but continuing to sit with my mouth shut, belly clenched.

I took my first breath when I was driving eighty miles an hour on I-94 West in the fall of twenty nineteen. Emancipated, I drove and drove on and on until I could see the spout of a whale in the waters of the Pacific.