He lived for 30 and something years in this dirty apartment, where it’s hard to breathe because the windows have been closed as long as I can remember. He would cook fish every single day, and the whole apartment would smell like it. I remember going there, and he’d greet me from the kitchen with an indifferent “hey” that I could barely hear through the sizzling of the oil in the frying pan. I’d come to his kitchen and sit, laughing with him at some really corny standup-comedian show. I wouldn’t find it funny if, let’s say, I was alone, but I’d still laugh just because it made him laugh. He’d ask me if I want some of his late meal, and I’d look at the burnt side of the pink salmon steak. It stank really intensely, and it had millions of bones in it that stuck in my teeth or accidently went down my throat. But I would eat it anyway, just because he might not share it with me next time.

I remember him playing pool at the bar around the corner on Fridays. I’d go there to talk to him, or tell him some really challenging problem I heard from school that might interest him. Although I knew the answer to it, I would pretend like I didn’t and still ask him if he could solve it. He’d think about it for a while, rolling around the colorful balls on the green pool table, and then if he couldn’t solve it, he’d tell me that there was something wrong with my problem. When I would tell him what the answer was, he’d get upset that I asked him to solve it if I knew the answer.

That one day he was supposed to go out with some people to celebrate his birthday, and for some reason, he didn’t end up going. I don’t even think he even had any real friends. Most of them were just coworkers that took credit for his work, talking about it on the local channels. He always stayed out of fame, and I’m sure he realized that lots of things were unfair, but he really didn’t mind. Nobody called him on his birthday. Everybody just kind of forgot about him.

He was about to spend the rest of his birthday sitting on his couch, so I drove him out to the lake in the middle of the forest. We swam for a while to the other shore of the lake and back. Then we sat together on the dirty, sandy bank, and he pulled out a bag of raisins with little stems in them and started eating. He met some people he went to high school with. They talked for a bit, and he told them about his birthday. They had probably never seen anybody sitting almost alone near the lake on his birthday. At some point I felt his loneliness, maybe even more than he did. I think his feelings kind of atrophied over the years. I looked at his hands with little hairs growing out of each finger and the way he grabbed raisins and put them in his mouth one-by-one, looking at the still lake. It was his birthday, and he was all alone. Maybe he wanted to cry about it, but he forgot how to. Those things he heard when he was young like “boys don’t cry” became the only principle of his life. And here he is: a man with a short black beard, a bag of unwashed raisins, and no feelings. Not even a feeling of solitude.

I haven’t really thought about him constantly or spoken to him, but if I do, I cry afterwards, every single time. It’s like his voice and the way he talks reminds me of something too painful in my life that I’ve forgotten being away from him. It’s almost like when you feel worried, and in your haste you forget where the worry came from. You keep thinking, what was it that made you so upset? Then you suddenly realize, when you accidentally find an old photo or an opened letter that fell behind your sofa. That’s how I felt talking to him: first happy, then deeply upset, which never prevented me from calling him again a few months later.

I kind of was always hoping he loved me in the end, so I pitied him for not being so open to me, or maybe he just didn’t know how to express his feelings too well. Who knows?

I was wasting my life trying to get some kind of emotion from him. How miserable my goal was. That’s the whole reason I would come to his tiny kitchen, where the walls have absorbed that oily fish smell, and watch him laugh at the dumb comedian wearing shorts with huge pink flowers and a hat that sat crookedly on his head.

It’s been a long time since I have seen him, maybe a year or two. It was really weird when that night we first met after a long time, and for some reason, I started to talk about how he doesn’t care about me.

“What about me? Would you even care if…I leave and never see you again?” He didn’t say a word, just mumbled.

“You can do what you want. It’s your life.” And then I started crying, as if it were expected. It was just an endless cry that doesn’t stop when you shower, or sleep, or sit in on your lectures trying to understand what the professor is talking about, or sink into the velvet red seat of the movie theatre. This cry never ceases. Who knows what the hell I am crying about? There seems to be a reason. While I can’t figure it out right now, there is a hell of a reason. As I weep with the red spots on my swollen face, looking at myself in the grimy window of the subway train, I try to lean on his shoulder. And he doesn’t move his hand to touch me.

Just a hand. Why would I want more? It isn’t money, or love, or compassion I seek. I just want his hand around me.

Right now.

And it’s not there.

And it would have been okay with me if this guy wasn’t my father.