Papa, if you weren’t hurt yourself,
would it have been harder to hurt me?
Would you have spoken to me with tenderness instead of thunder?
Would your hands have known how to comfort,
instead of leaving their mark in ways I can still feel?
I wonder if the boy you once were —
small, scared, and searching for love —
ever imagined he’d become a man
capable of breaking someone so small,
so much like him.
I try to picture you as that boy,
before life had its way with you,
before the weight of someone else’s pain
pressed so heavy on your chest that you forgot how to breathe.
I wonder if someone hurt you,
if their words left scars that never faded,
if their silence felt like a door slammed in your face.
Did you carry that hurt into every room you entered?
Did it make you smaller, angrier,
until there was nothing left to give but rage?
You never told me why you were so angry.
You never told me why love felt sharp,
like a knife I had to hold by the blade.
Did you know I was learning from you,
watching you,
taking notes on what love looked like,
and believing it was supposed to hurt?
I’ve spent years trying to unlearn it,
to tell myself that love doesn’t have to feel like walking barefoot
through broken glass.
But some lessons sink too deep.
I want to ask you,
was it your father’s voice I heard in yours?
Was it his hand I felt in the way yours shook with fury?
Did you ever think about breaking the cycle,
or were you too caught in it to even see the cracks forming in me?
I want to hate you for what you did,
for the nights I cried quietly into my pillow
so you wouldn’t hear,
for the days I wondered if I was the problem,
if I was too much,
or worse, not enough.
But hate is heavy, and I’m already carrying so much.
Sometimes, in the quiet hours of the night,
when the world is still and I can finally breathe,
I feel your sadness wrapped around me like a second skin.
I don’t know if it’s mine or yours anymore.
Maybe it’s both.
If you weren’t hurt yourself,
would you have been able to see me —
really see me — not as a mirror of your own pain,
but as someone worth protecting,
someone worth loving without conditions?
Would you have shown me how to love myself,
how to believe that I didn’t have to earn love by surviving it?
But you were hurt, Papa.
And now I’m here,
would you have thought of my stomach
before yours, if all you ever knew
wasn’t scrounging for food?
