Life...

1.
This piece is pretty personal, but let's get personal. Shout out to my father, this songs for you : Your Joy by Chrisette Michelle. Now it's time for the piece...

God had to teach me how to love my father. God, had to teach me how to love my father. Like teach me what it meant to say I love you to him. And how to feel when my father doesn’t respond. God had to teach me how to love my father. The thing is that I had to understand that he didn’t deserve the life he was dealt, he didn’t deserve the mother he has and he didn’t deserve to lose his biological father at the time he did. I mean he didn’t deserve to live in a house where love and affection was a foreign object that no one knew or wanted to deal with. So…God had to teach me how to love my father. Because growing up as a kid, no young boy wants to be beaten by his drunken stepfather, no young boy wants his mother to criticize every move he makes. Striking fear in his whole being. There is a reason that my father can’t communicate with me, and there is a reason I don’t have a relationship with my dad like the ones girls have on the T.V. shows and movies. I resent my dad and it took me years, at the ripe age of 18, to admit that to myself. See, I have a soft spot for my father, even though he doesn’t know how to love me or my mother. I resent my dad for not being kind, and I resent my dad for not letting my mother be who she really is. I resent my dad for growing up how he did, and I resent my dad for pressuring me to play sports and not letting me explore some of my other interests. I resent my dad, for who he is. Then you ask, where is the soft spot you said you had for your father. See it took me years to be able to say I resented him, because I know a bad drug habit, losing your father, and a sucky mother can make someone like my dad. Because God had to teach me how to love my father. He guided my heart to uncover the real attributes my father brings to this world, helped uncover my eyes and see the unfailing faith my father has in the Lord, and how I wish and pray I could be if even a little bit like him! God had to pull me in the direction to get the correct point of view of my dad. The view where I could see his golden days and his athleticism and realize that’s where I get it from. God shows me in myself that, that bad temper I hate in my father is planted right into me. To really see that even though the love my dad has for my mother is something only she can understand, it is still love. See my dad can’t really say how he feels, because he doesn’t know how. But all this resentment built up inside of me can’t even match up to the amount of love and passion and understanding I have for the Godly man he is today. I see this side of him, and I’ve learned that there are reasons behind the way my dad speaks, the way he acts, the way he gives and accepts love, there are even reasons behind the way my dad sits, or talks, or leans. There are reasons for the way my father is. My dad is the corniest person ever, and he is the most goal driven man I’ve come across, and last but not least my dad is someone who has too many faults to count but even in his old age he is learning how to address them and fix them or even accept them. God taught me how to love my father. God gave me a second father who is all human and falls to sins and worldly matters daily, but God gave me a father who wants nothing but the best for me, and loves me more than I think he realizes. When I left for college my dads’ heart broke, and so did mine for my fathers. I am happy because I know how to love my father. And through the pain and through the endurance, I have learned to stick it through and see a brighter side of the tunnel. The tunnel between myself and my father. There he stands and there I stand, the explanation of our relationship. He stands on one understanding and I stand on another. Two understandings that just can’t seem to agree on….anything. There’s this weird thing that happens, when I look at my dad, I see someone I love, and someone I no longer resent in any way. And I wonder if he ever regrets the things he said to me, or the way he talked to me as a child. I wonder if he knew he was wrong. Because he was wrong. But I also I wonder if he knows that I have forgiven him for everything he has ever done, for the way he yelled at me, for the way he pressured me to pursue something my heart did not want forever. I wonder if he knows that I love him, more than I can even explain. I love my dad to the point of exhaustion, like to the point of pain. Because I would never want anything to stand in between me and him ever again.

Sincerely,
Ariel Braxton 

2. 

I wonder if my parents ever know how much I love them. Do they know that I get a tugging ache on my heart that feels like 20 million men are trying to pull my living apparatus out of its place? And I'm fighting back with every ounce of my being to take a simple breath. Do they know I get that feeling every time I realize that there’s a thing called death? That one day I won't have either of them on this earth with me, to walk along with in this journey. Do they know how I envy thee? The person who was born to an 18 year old mother, I envy them because I would grow up in poverty to spend an extra day with my mom. I would sacrifice my childhood to give my family all they ever wanted when I got that dream job. And I worry that by the time I hit success my parents won't be able to physically enjoy it. Because like the Niagara Falls…fall; I fall in the idea that old age is creeping upon my family like a thief in the night and I'm a young infant that can't stand up and fight. Because death is inevitable. And I cannot fight it. Death has been sitting on the edge of my brain and he won't leave like he's actually afraid of himself. Because he won't jump off the edge, and face what he is. And I'm 18 and I want to live free but life's idea of death keeps chasing me.…so I run faster and faster and I'm not slowing down anytime soon because death is Usain bolt and I'm the chubby kid in middle school struggling to run the mile. But God bless me and give me wheels because I'll be running till you allow death to catch me. I plan on living recklessly, I want drunken Friday nights, and I want to fall in love so hard that it hurts me every day. I talked to my mother the other day and my heart clinched at every word she said, because I wanted to keep every one of those words because I realized that one day I won’t get to hear them every day. And it hurts me to know she and my father have regrets and for them I will live a life that is beyond full. I told her I will love relentlessly for her, I will drown in the oceans of the foreign world holding her soul in my heart, and I will laugh with her even when she is no longer physically here. I will not dwell on death one day, but that day is not today.


Sincerely,

Ariel Braxton