Things I Never Told My Father

By Habib

I have spent years talking to you in the quiet places of my mind. In the steam of my morning coffee, in the hush before sleep, in the echo of your favorite old songs that sometimes find me in grocery aisles or stuck in traffic. I speak to you in half-sentences and sighs — things I wish I’d said when you were still sitting across the dinner table, your calloused hands folded like a fortress between us.

I want to tell you first that I forgive you — or that I’m trying to. I think forgiveness is less of a moment and more of a garden that I have to water every day. Some days, weeds choke the flowers. Some days, I let them. But mostly, I try. I try to forgive the way your silence shaped me. How you could stand in a room and make it feel smaller with a look, how you held your love behind your teeth like it might escape if you opened your mouth too wide.

Did you know, Dad? I used to watch you fix things. A squeaky hinge, a leaky pipe, the broken legs of my childhood chair. I’d stand by the door, watching you crouched under the sink or hunched over a workbench. You were at your calmest when your hands were busy, as if you could only mend the world by not speaking to it. I learned then that love was a nail driven deep, a thing that held without being seen.

I wish I’d told you I wanted more. That I wanted you to tell me who you were before you were my father. Did you have dreams that never got out of your small hometown? Did you fall in love before Mom? Did someone break your heart? Did your father love you the way you tried to love me — wordless, stern, hidden behind duty and the smell of motor oil?

There’s so much I never asked you. I didn’t ask why you never came to my school plays — though you always told Mom to go. I didn’t ask why you stood outside my room after we fought, your shadow leaking under the door like a soft apology you couldn’t say out loud. I didn’t ask why you bought me that bike for my sixteenth birthday — the one you knew I wanted but pretended not to care about. You left it leaning against the garage, with a bow that looked like an afterthought. I rode it until the paint peeled and the chain rusted, pretending each turn of the pedals was your way of saying you were proud of me.

I wish I’d told you I was angry. Angry that you taught me how to read an atlas but never taught me how to ask for directions in life. Angry that you made me tough when I wanted permission to be soft. Angry that I inherited your stubborn silence and wear it now like a coat too heavy for summer days.

There are things you never told me, too. I know that now. Maybe you didn’t know how. Maybe you thought I’d just understand — that love was in the roof you paid for, the dinners you ate without praise, the lights that stayed on because you woke up before dawn and came home after dark. Maybe you thought the roof and the lights and the dinners were enough. Sometimes they were. Sometimes I needed a story instead — one where you were the hero who fought for me not just with money but with words like I’m proud of you or I’m sorry or Tell me what’s hurting you.

You’ve been gone for seven years now. I thought it would get easier. It hasn’t. I talk to you more now than I ever did when you were alive. Some nights I still expect your boots by the door, your cough in the hallway. I still hope you might appear in a dream to explain yourself — to give me the lines you never spoke, the instructions I’m still looking for.

Dad, I hope you hear me now. I hope there’s a place where you stand in some wide green field, fixing broken things with your strong hands, humming a tune you never let me hear. I hope you see the woman I’m trying to become — soft, stubborn, open-mouthed with wonder and grief. I hope you know that I carry you in the slope of my shoulders, in my quiet rage, in my restless need to make things right.

I wish I’d told you all of this when you could nod, grunt, or look away like you did when feelings sat too big between us. But I’m saying it now, in these lines, in this small garden of forgiveness that I water with my words. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s the only repair left for us.

And if you’re listening — and I hope somehow you are — know that the things I never told you are the roots under my feet, holding me steady in the storms. And maybe, just maybe, that means you’re still fixing things after all.