A letter from my father

Which way would you have preferred? Would it have been better in a month, in a year? Five years? Would you have felt the loss less, would you be then more ready than today to miss my voice, to welcome my absence at home, to forget my face?
There is no right time, figlia mia, and whichever day I had chosen to leave, you would still have felt the same pain. Because our connection goes beyond words of love, it soaks in endearment printed in our genes. You are part of me, and I am part of you. And my leaving cannot change that.
But don’t let our common genes determine your future. I was what I was. You can, you have to choose to be whatever you want.
I was what I was, and I now feel I missed the mark. My being immersed in a wood forest, I tried to climb up, up, hoping to build a small house tree to escape the fire of my rage. The rage which brought me to fight for rights, striking and shouting, and which later burned my liver. I climbed, borrowing tools to build the house, the vision from above sustaining my dream of expansion. Headaches creeped in the wood house like an ant colony, our future eaten up in slow motion. Ants where everywhere, the more I tried to chase them, the more they came back, their skills at finding the right path much better than my own. At then I found myself crawling like them, I became one of them, and saw that the only path they followed was the one which brought food. Day in, day out, following the same path, making it deeper and deeper, the walls around me so high that my vision was gone, and all I could do is work and work. Frustration fed my rage, my rage fed the fire eating my liver alive, piece by piece until it was nothing more than an obscene useless abscess which exploded in my body. And I was gone.
I was what I was, and but you don’t need to follow my blindness and narrow path. Grow larger than life, grow tall up to heaven, strong and multifaceted like a pine forest.
Don’t be sorry for me, as past is no more. Let the sadness of the missed chance to say goodbye behind you, let it be a clean pain. Just a clean pain.

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