From: Your Son
To: Dad
Subject: To The Boy I Never Learned to Love Before

Hey, Pa.

It is exactly three hours and thirty-three minutes past midnight, the kind of hour when ghosts wander. It is eerily quiet—not the kind you would call peaceful; it is one that echoes. If you are reading this, then congratulations—we have gotten closer to each other than we ever did while being in the same room. Strange, isn't it? That I have spent all these years in silence, but now that my sorrow is the one holding my pen, I am writing to you.

Pa, you and I are more alike than I ever wanted to admit.

Ever since, I have always believed I was more like Ma—the warmth you never quite figured out how to be. I was told I carry her brown eyes, but why do they glint with your fury as they stare back at me in the mirror? I have inherited not just your name, but also your untamed spirit, and I resent you for that—for the parts of you that spread within me like an unchecked wildfire.

I can feel your rage pulsing through my veins and it has found its way into my words. I find metaphors in the storms you brought into our home. I search for it in the wreckage of your love; in the way you would come home late — eyes tired but searching for something you could not name. I blame you for these things, Pa. I wreak havoc in my own life and in its aftermath, I always realize that I am, after all, your son.

But tonight, I write to you not from anger, but from a strange understanding.

I forgive you for being the man I never truly understood. I forgive you for the way you loved me from a distance, as though you were afraid of breaking me with your hands. I forgive you for the walls between us, even though I still do not know how they got there in the first place. Your words have always been like locked doors I have spent years trying to open, and I still search for the keys in the depths of your anger. You are a language that felt alien in my own tongue and I forgive myself, too, for never learning how to speak your soul.

You made a writer out of me, and so I will write to bridge this gap between us with these letters until we meet somewhere—perhaps in the spaces between, or in the pauses where we never spoke. I will write with the hope that someday, our words will finally align and we will not work so hard to translate what each other has to say through our anger.

One day, we won't have to bleed just to feel close. And maybe then, the rage will finally be quelled.

But until then, I forgive you, Pa.

Because beneath all this, I know you loved me; you just didn't know how.

And that's okay—we are both learning.

Sincerely,

Your son who loves you, still.

- Sean Clifford Malinao
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