A Cycle Called Pain

So today, I was sitting in my media class getting bored with my project as usual, so I decided to check my email for the hell of it. That's when I got the email from my dad with a letter he wrote me as an attachment. I opened it, but seriously started to tear up without even reading it. I obviously was not going to read it in class, but that wound up being the only thing on my mind the entire day. Things are just hard right now.

I got home and read it, and I never expected it to be what it was about. My dad is the kind of person that never shows feelings. He wasn't raised in an outright loving family, and he didn't raise us to be that way either. There are no signs of affection in my family. In fact, the only hug I distinctly remember getting from my dad was the morning I was supposed to leave for Frost Valley in 9th grade. The weather was terrible, and the roads were just slates of ice. As all the parents were leaving, they hugged their kids goodbye. I'm still not sure if my dad only hugged me then just because he felt the pressure to be like the other parents, or if it was because he was truly afraid. We were all afraid of that trip; hence the reason why it wound up being postponed anyway. But I remember it just being the weirdest feeling getting a hug from my dad, and that's kind of upsetting to me. It shouldn't be a rare and unusual feeling when your own father hugs you, but that's the way it's always been in my family.

Anyway, back to that letter. He mentioned in it how he was raised that way, and how his whole family just kind of assumed that they all knew they loved each other. He said he never felt the need to tell his father how much he appreciated everything he did for his family and how much he really did love him. He always believed he would say it later on. Now, I knew my dad's own father died of a massive heart attack when my dad was only 20. He told me that a while ago, and it never really seemed to affect him, although I knew it must have. However, he never told me exactly what happend that day, and that's what the letter was mainly about. Essentially, my dad was the cause of his own father's death that night. It was pretty much because of him not being home on time that one night that his father got worried and a whole bunch of other things that eventually led to him having that final heart attack that night. I'm not going to sit here and write all that happend and what everything was about, but I'll just have you know that I was an emotional wreck as I read this letter, just as I have been this entire day. This was the first time my dad ever showed some sort of honest emotion, and everything it was about was just so hard to handle, since everything we have been going through. Things started to make sense about why he is the way he is and why he does the seemingly pointless things he does.

I feel terrible about everything. I know it's not completely my fault about what has happend between my dad and myself, but it still has a lot to do with me. If i wasn't so damn stubborn about everything and if I could just give into him once, maybe things wouldn't be the way they are now. But what happend happend. You can't change the past, but you can change the direction your life will continue to go. Ugh...I have so much more to say about all this, but I just can't deal with this anymore. Not today, anyway. I've had enough for today.