No, I don’t celebrate Father’s Day, and I never have. The world doesn’t know how to hold that sentence gently, so it sits in my mouth like broken glass. He was the worst man alive and I am his favorite daughter. Imagine the cruelty of that arrangement. Imagine God loving Lucifer best and then throwing him from heaven. That’s what it felt like: to be adored by a man who taught me how to burn.

He looked at me like softness was the first sin. Maybe it was. That's why my hands grew calluses instead of poems. I was the only girl born to a family of storms. My brothers were thunder, born louder, older, angrier. They threw fists like prayers and nobody stopped them. I watched and learned to bleed like men do—loud, stupid, without apology.

The anger comes in waves—like a dog fight, like blood under the fingernails, like a choir screaming the wrong notes in unison. I want to say it’s mine. I want to own it like a weapon or a kingdom. But I know it isn’t. I know where it came from. My father gave it to me the way God gave Lucifer the morning star. 'Here, burn with it. Go on. See if you can carry that light without choking on the fire.'

It lives in me like a second skeleton, jointed with rust and teeth. Sometimes I wonder if I was born or summoned—if my mother was a vessel or a battlefield. The rage was an inheritance. Rage like a birthright. Rage like a god curled up in my chest, sleeping with one eye open. I carry it in my jaw, in the way I clench through disappointment, in the way I want to destroy the things I love so they can’t leave me first.

My father used to slam doors so hard the walls shook like frightened animals. I remember the way his hands trembled with restraint. The kind of restraint that’s a performance. He never hit us. He just let the rage bloom in the room like a second sun, hot and unavoidable. I learned early that love could look like a clenched jaw. Love could sound like silence, so loud it made your ears ring. I learned to cry quietly. I learned to read the air like a soldier reads landmines.

My father always stood too straight. I never saw him kneel. He said love was a leash and he would not be tethered. He loved control, not people. He loved rules because he could bend them and blame us for snapping. My mother once said he smiled like a man watching something drown. 

They say daughters become their mothers, but I was forged in his shape. His hands, his temper, his way of turning a compliment into a blade.

I tell myself I’m different, but I spit the same kind of fire. It doesn’t matter what I believe, the flame comes out the same color. I tried praying once, just to see what it would feel like. My tongue blistered. I looked up at the ceiling, whispered ‘God,’ and the drywall cracked. God wasn’t listening. Or maybe He was. The silence and the answer sound the same when your blood’s boiling.

Unfortunately for all of us, I have my father's penchant for being the worst person in any room. The sharp tongue, the pride that won’t bend even when it breaks everything in its path. I have his laugh, too, but mine doesn’t reach the eyes either. I’m trying, God knows I’m trying, but I was built in the likeness of a man who could never apologize.

And here’s the part where I want to claw my veins out. If I could just get his name out of my bloodstream, perhaps I wouldn’t feel like a monster all the time. But the truth is, I am more like him than I’ll ever admit. Maybe I already have. Maybe that’s the secret: he didn’t ruin me. He made me. He named me.

So no, I don’t celebrate Father’s Day. I observe it like a ritual. Like a moment of silence before the execution. I carry the damage like a family heirloom. God made the angels, but He only gave one a voice loud enough to rival His own. And I don’t know if I’m the miracle or the punishment.

Because when people say ‘You remind me of your father,’ I flinch. But I don’t deny it.

I never could.

- Beatrice Diane D. Bartolome 

(Illustration by Mary Nicole Halili/FEU Advocate)