Dear Dad, I am writing to you from the depths of the abyss. This image may seem frightening, but it is nevertheless from there that a very small light persists. I hope that one day the word “darkness” will no longer rhyme with “fear”. I’m not afraid to dive anymore, I can breathe underwater, after all, I’m a mermaid.
My background is unique. I was thought to be a boy and finally, I am a woman. Woman, I move forward having lived through two adolescences, two coming out and two adult lives. Mapping a second life requires patience, energy, effort and lots of love.
In writing to you, there is comfort in the brooding darkness, the placental darkness from which one comes to the light. I’m writing to you, since it’s Father’s Day (a little late of course, but I thought it was important to use my platform in this prestigious newspaper that is the Duty to address you).
Being a forestry worker, you had to multiply your absences for work, to offer us food on the table, to offer us a roof so that we could build our respective “selves”. Despite everything, I experienced your absences as an abandonment. Forgive me if it was so. In childhood, we even integrate the things that we do not understand and the tree grows with the nutrients of the soil that we have designated for it.
And me, I can only write if it’s to have the tears that cross the fringe of my eyelashes, only to hurt my hands and bring me back to existence. I admire my tears. They are warriors who can end a war fought within. Writing is a necessary extreme sport for me. So I am writing this letter to you to be, to go beyond who I am.
Dear dad, you saw me being the ghost of myself, being this sad little boy who does not understand the roles to be played as a man and I have long been ashamed of not being able to fulfill this role. In our 1990s in the depths of the village, without any information on transidentity, we wandered from question to question without the slightest beginning of an answer. Our silences were so heavy that our lips were paralyzed, and one day we lost our speech. The years passed and the silence grew in the tectonics of our incomprehension. Then, adolescence was made up of a procession of leaks.
Daddy, I know you loved me, that you love me, but I’m sorry. Forgive me this love which fell to the ground without my being able to integrate it, this love which I wanted to grasp with my enthusiastic hands, but which immediately flew away. I looked for traces of it in the coldest nights. Forgive me for not knowing how to synthesize that love you gave to a boy who wasn’t me. I looked for you so much in the faces of the men I asked if they loved me.
Dear Dad, I never forgot the taste of the meals you cooked during our lunch breaks at school, your Elvis songs and your similar voice. What a happy childhood, when you think about it, mom played Joe Dassin and you sang Elvis.
Your absences made your returns always a celebration. It comes back to me now that I’m out of survival mode, now that I get up in the morning and can thank life as I overcame my fear of living alone for a year and became an adult at thirty-two years, when I stopped drinking to poison myself, when I love, in all my truth, and when I finally learn to love myself.
You are part of my truth, Dad, and I thank you for that. If I can go this far in life, it is partly thanks to your legacy of devotion to loved ones, your devotion to work carried out for an altruistic purpose.
It’s a beautiful story, basically, every time you rejoice for your successful trans daughter, every time you admire who she’s always been.
Thank you dad, for being there, more than ever.