Becoming My Father
︎︎︎ Adeline Swartzendruber
︎ Nov 22, 2024
I want to drop out. I want to work with my hands. I want to relinquish my duty to the world of thoughtful people. I want to make minimum wage at Burger King supplemented by regular donations of plasma. I want to sing the blues with a one-in-one-thousand guttural access to my hidden nexus of pain. One-in-one-thousand isn’t enough, you need one-in-a-million to get famous. I want my band to disintegrate because my drunken madness gets me banned from half the bars we play in. I want to fall in love with my small town’s sole punk rock girl. I want her to be there with the car waiting when I wake up in a field. I want to throw a knife in our vibrant orange kitchen. I want to run with our toddler age daughter into the bushes while the cop lights turn our ordinary street into a scene from a movie, the thrilling kind with chases, and close-up shots of the anti-hero’s intense dark-eyed gaze. I want to let you punch me so it’s even. I want to complain of an aching jaw that lasts a decade. I want to go into construction. I want to make haunted houses look new. I want to look down at the shrinking world from a precarious lift. I want to text with a picture of my view that makes you terrified. I want to come home and punch a hole in my old painting. I want to burn with regret and patch it up with safety pins. I think I like it better now, actually. I want to move to a bigger house, not too far away but somewhere else. I want to speed through time, or slow it down, or both. I want cocaine during the day and alcohol at all hours, mint liquor in Gatorade bottles rolling on the floor of my truck. I want to fall asleep on the living room couch at 5 p.m. as a rebellion against routine. I want to smoke beneath the evergreen tree that stains our children with sap when they climb its perilous branches, their first taste of the urge that led me to make my money on the tops of buildings. I want to get divorced and I want to get mean. I want to live in the attic of my mother’s barn. I want to shiver through the cold with my brand new giant television. I want to reach into that hidden spiral nexus of pain and spit out violence into the world. I want to perform, and if the bars won’t have me, the front yard will do. I want to kick our daughter in my steel-toed boots, a little blood and a very big bruise. I want the sound and impact of our feet hitting the pavement passing infinite cornfields, I want a new chase scene with the neighbors watching, the relentless sun beating down overhead. I offer to let my daughter hit me back; Not offer— beg. She refuses. She’s smarter than you are, you know. I want you all to leave me alone. I want to fall in love again, too quickly. I want the landscape of my childhood, the rickety bridge over the glimmering Kennel Lake creek, down hidden wooded pathways that used to feel more expansive and more secret. The dew on the grass. My nephew whizzing past on my race-car red childhood bike. I want to start my whole life over again. I want to pretend I’d do it right this time. I want to say, “I promise.”
Adeline Swartzendruber is a writer and actress living in Brooklyn. Her work has previously been published in Expat, Charm School Mag, and Egirl Zine.