Well, if you must know...

When I was ten, I thought it was a game. I thought he was screwing with me on purpose when he blurted out obscenities at the dinner table or forgot my birthday and consistently guessed my age about two years too young. It hurt more when he had to ask me who I was. I thought he was trying to insult me. I thought he was trying to intimidate me with his incoherent outbursts of rage that grew in frequency and duration with each passing day. When he started falling over all the time, I thought maybe my fourth grade best friend had been right when she called my dad an alcoholic, which incidentally was the comment that officially ended our friendship. I thought I was the cause of his constant migraines, because I never backed down from what I thought were his challenges to my character. I thought maybe I wasn't good enough, unique enough, to stand out in his mind, so I started practicing my theatrics and brushing up on my performance. I could act, throw a punch line, sing, dance, I could leap through the air and break a bone on the way down, anything to keep him entertained, keep me in his sights, so he wouldn't forget my name again until the very last light went out. By the time the doctors let us in on what was happening to him, it was too late for them to convince me. He was not sick. He was not dying. He was Hamlet, feigning insanity to get at some deeper, hidden truth. I have been playing Ophelia ever since, waiting for the day when I can make my grand gesture, and leap into the stream to let my heavy velvet drag me to the bottom, and maybe even earn a little spiritual heroism on the way down. A few days before died, when I was 13 and he was about a week away from his 38th birthday, I went to see him in the hospital for the first time in months. He hadn't been able to speak or even sit up in bed for about just as long. That's when Mom had taken pitty on me and stopped making me go to visit. So anyway, I went to see him because it was pretty clear the jig was almost up. I leaned over his bed when Mom left the room, and I tried to talk to him. I just looked him in the eye and couldn't think of anything to say. I just kept repeating, like a mantra, "I'm your daughter. You know that. You know." He just kept looking over my face, studying it like a map. I swear he looked me straight in the eye. And a tear roled off his face and hit the pillow. That was the last time I ever saw him "alive", and I swear to God, if anyone ever tries to tell me that his tear was just eye strain, I'll throw them to the ground and rip them to pieces like a dog.