Everything counts.

After the reading at the end of my fellowship this past summer he said "I hope all of your pieces aren't like that" and I said "You haven't seen anything yet". I wasn't kidding. It made him uncomfortable and I felt that as his pride. I felt his pride after the Huffington Post interview. I felt his pride when I brought home a scholarship from school and left it on the table, but now it seems to be gone, the pride, the paper, the tie. This is who he is and who I am and I have so much to tell him but he's never listening. There are too many doors between us. He is so sad that it bleeds into everything. I hide in my room and write these things because then I don't have to see him crumble into himself. He's my dad. It's too much that he's a man, too.

But I have to keep reaching. Fighting yesterday won't make it so we never fight again. We may fight tomorrow and for years because when he wakes up in the morning he's a Marine but I'm always reminding myself that I'm not a Spice Girl. We're different but we have so much, maybe too much, in common. There are so many walls and I refuse to let them stay.  I'll still be looking for him to show up at a show or my door and say, "Hey, you're ready to go." Last night I wore a scarf as a blindfold and got a friend lost on the way home. He wants to talk.