My father does not believe in God or therapists—

instead, he pedals his bike past Brighton Beach to the Coney Island Y to swim his fifty laps.

Once, I went with him and watched as he emerged from the locker room in faded swim trunks

moving slowly to the edge of the pool. He paused, lifting his hands over the gray halo on his chest,

pressing his palms together in a gesture I know he learned as a boy.

My father’s eyes: devout with a darkness he keeps buried deep inside

where it glows hell-hot as the ember from the cigarillo his father—a womanizer,

drunk, half-asleep—dropped on the sheets setting the bed ablaze, and even though extinguished

kept smoldering invisibly inside the mattress springs, reigniting, sending the house up in smoke a second time.

So my father’s anger burns, a blood-wicked flame scorching through the softest parts of his interior

until it rages through the house, blackening the rooms again.

Even in the absence of ideology I am trying to learn forgiveness—

I watched my father’s body breach the air for just a moment before he dove, disappearing beneath the surface.

Steam coiling through the chlorinated room, the ripples his body made still reached me on the other side.

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed