ESSAY // On Fatherhood

Phases

For my daughter, who gave voice to the boy I used to be/

by Shawn Theodore

EXCERPT //

My father came home late, smelling of burnt metal and exhaustion, his breath close enough to my ear that I could count its weight. He didn’t breathe. A waiting.

They called me quiet. Said it like a compliment, like praise for a child who knew how not to disrupt the world. But what they called quiet was my absence from their version of it. My stillness was a language. I just hadn't been given a listener.

He didn’t speak to me—he spoke over me, into the dark. And what he said folded itself into the lining of my childhood: “I hate you. I never should’ve had you.”

I never moved. Not even when he left. That kind of pain doesn't rush—it settles. It becomes the room. That was the first time I realized silence could bruise. //

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