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📓 Sunday, August 17, 2025 — 7:37 p.m.
I got home a bit ago. Closed the door.
I’m sitting in the dark—TV glow the only light.
Like the glow inside a cave. My cave.
YouTube chatter hums. The low drone of the A/C.
Finally, I’m here in my chair.
This chair… my escape.
The spot where I vanish from the grind,
the endless grid of life.
Here, I’m free for a moment,
before the warden comes knocking.
Knock, knock — motherfucker.
Memory hits. I’m 17 again.
Nerves shaking like bad wiring.
Inward ticking, unbalanced.
Thinking: Fuck… what will be of my life?
About to graduate—1, 2, 3.
Or was I really?
The auditorium was filled with smiles.
Parents pulling out cameras to catch the hallmark moment.
Well… not for me. Not on this day.
Caps tilted. Parents clapping.
Programs in their hands read futures like promises:
Cal State Long Beach. Cal State L.A. Santa Monica. Pasadena.
Me? 1.7 GPA.
Five F’s to make up.
No diploma.
Night school waited for this 17-year-old ghost.
Invisible. Forgotten.
My father sat there, stone-cold face,
wearing disappointment like a suit.
Funny thing is, for three—maybe four—months that year,
he wasn’t even there at all.
He had abandoned us—
my mother, and my baby sister, just two years old—
for another woman.
A woman who dressed his way,
combed her hair his way,
spoke the way he wanted her to speak.
He sculpted people in the image of his head.
Us too.
Which pants to wear. Which shoes. Which socks.
But it never held.
Because none of us were his image.
We were who we were.
He never saw it that way.
A month before graduation, a deal was struck.
His return to the family.
Before I could speak, he cut me down:
“Do not say nothing. This does not concern you.”
Family isn’t what you see in movies.
Maybe for some. Not for me.
So when he showed up at my graduation,
the weight of disappointment was already loaded in his stare.
I was the cracked reflection.
The little engine that came off the tracks.
And that diploma?
I carried it too—
not paper, but shame.
Heavier than the rest.
One I’ve lived with my whole life.
Yes, I got it eventually—
a year of 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., five days a week.
Night school grind.
But it never erased the weight I carried that day.
And now, decades later,
here I sit in this blue, clothed chair.
A/C still humming.
TV light on my face,
still holding that invisible diploma in my lap.
This isn’t sadness.
It’s understanding.
This is to failure.
To disappointment.
To never being.
To the counselor with the clipboard: “School might not be for you.”
To the program that wrote my 1.7 GPA in invisible ink,
like the boy himself was invisible.
To my father: “Wear this shirt, these socks. Walk this way, talk this way.”
But my body resisted.
Geometry, biology—none of it landed.
Pay attention.
The world said pay attention.
The teacher said pay attention.
My father said pay attention.
My body screamed: No.
This ain’t gonna end well for us.
I don’t care about theorems.
I don’t care about mitochondria.
I am an artist.
I was that kid who drew my English teacher with a dildo in her hand—
and got paid by classmates to sketch nudes of their girlfriends.
No, they didn’t hand me naked pics.
Use your imagination, collect your cash.
Arcade money.
And here I am, still drawing, still writing.
Still resisting.
I don’t hate my father.
How can you hate someone who doesn’t even know why he thinks the way he does?
I understand him now.
He needed control the way I needed freedom.
And in his absence—in his sculpting, in his disappointment—
I found the resistance that shaped me.
I’ve learned: pain, disappointment, failure is material.
Fragments of you.
You will disappoint.
You will fail.
You will hurt.
Wear it. Live in it. Learn from it.
It’s not what you think it is.
It’s a chamber of lessons.
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