Inheritance

A good man died last week,
and my strange little brain
couldn’t help but make it about me.

Not because death belongs to me,
but because grief
and those festering, infected wounds.

My uncle—
the man my father never learned to be.

And jealousy crept in quietly,

for a family that spoke to one another
with love instead of condemnation and shame,
where children grew up believing they were wanted.

Good people.
A good man.
A loving father.

Family Dinners.

Children who never doubted
what they meant to him,
their place in his life.

I wonder what that must have been like.

⸻

In my house,
our names were stories
told by an unreliable narrator.

He built a version of us carefully enough
that an entire bloodline doesn’t know
my first name,
my story,
or my fears—

and I, theirs.

They know
the version of me my father needed to exist.

Not how far out of hell
I had to climb
just to become this gentle.

Or what it cost
to become something soft.

⸻

I found out he died
from my neighbor,
not an uncle or his wife.

A familiar confusion:

aren’t we family?

But it isn’t their fault.

Somehow,
the only thing left
connecting us
was the man
who spent a lifetime
keeping us apart.

A father who kept us
like a locked room.

There are no crimes, after all,
when the victims have no voice.

⸻

The pastor told a story
and said my father’s name—

just not the name we knew him by.

And beside it, his best friend’s—

two men who nearly buried me
before deciding not to.

All because
he hated me
for being too strong.

I’m a horse he couldn’t break.

Built wrong.

Too smart to be controlled.
Too resilient to be shaped.

Like broken hearts
passed through bloodlines,

and inherited dilapidated houses.

Maybe that’s the curse.

And now I’m 
breaking what was handed down
by not passing it on.
⸻

Beneath the grief,

the ugliest truth:

jealousy.

Not of the man who died—

but of the children
who got to call him Dad,
and never had to wonder
what love was,
or how it was supposed to feel.

The pastor spoke
of someone who filled rooms,
gave freely,
loved loudly,
and never hid
his love
or his dislike.

In that,
my inheritance, too.