Experience is full of unfinished histories and lingering wounds. I’ve learned to feel touched by the ways that people try to repair things in fantasy that they don’t know how to repair in reality. I think often people crave to fix things that they don’t entirely realize are broken. But sometimes nothing is fixed, and in the end, we just let go.
I was furious with my dad as a teenager, above all because he drank, until the day I realized in an argument that he was vulnerable, that my anger could hurt him. It then felt as if my anger had served its existential purpose and it mostly vanished from my body, and from then on, we were flawed but mostly gentle with each other.