when I was far too young to understand what the word disappointment meant,

an earthquake shook my house and left a hole in the living room floor shaped like my father

he was a man made of shattered mirrors and kitchen cleavers, only able to bear the sight of his reflection when it was so distorted that he could see his sliced intentions as noble ones

when glass and metal turn to whirlwind tempest

nothing is left without scars

the day I found out he was leaving us, I curled up between my mother's chest and the pinstriped sofa

because even as the hole grew underneath us

she was all I had ever needed to hold onto

when we put a state border between his wreckage and our reconstruction, he still called every night just to hear the sound of my voice

I was six and still loved him

I was seven and blurred his features

I was eight and turned the conversations to clockwork dialogue

I was nine and curled up between my mother's "she's asleep, rob" and the covers under which I was most definitely not asleep

the phone stopped ringing, anyway

when the boy in second grade had the nerve to pursue my attention with phrases unfamiliar on the roof of his mouth, his mother found her own vocabulary with which to define me

I brought his advances on myself because I was a Broken Home Child

mixed-race child

smart but opinionated child

which to county mothers means Broken Child

I was seven years old

my mother and I did not have matching melanin or last names

which is to say

county mothers did not think me hers to claim

I shared a last name with a first name I couldn't always place

with a face I didn't know any more

I am a writer, and it is the only word I have ever despised

when I still thought my mother was larger than life

I would say that divorce was just a word she crushed up in her cereal

I would say that my dad remained a taped-together collage of broken pieces that she was done putting back together

or that she was simply tired of cutting herself on his edges

so when his first phone call on my eleventh birthday sent lightning along our telephone wires, I was forced to see her as she actually was—the most powerful tsunami the ocean had ever felt, magnificent in her rage

she carried with her the waves of a thousand saltwater excuses, and they were spilling over onto the kitchen floor

our house was caving in under a gunpowder gray sky much too thick with tucked away truths as I found out what she had known for years:

my father was a storm we didn't see coming, swept up in a string of lovers I hadn't been privy to

I did not ever imagine a life where my mother would be a woman scorned

I should not ever have had to

when my father didn't look so broken, he combined my mother's Scottish winter with his Texan sun and created something so explosive it could only take human form in me

born in the August heat

a week late

and blinding

he made me into dry brush and summer spark

and when the flames finally caught

he called fire too quickly to realize that every promise he made was just another drop of gasoline in an already far-too-flammable heart

my matchstick tongue grew every bit as combustible as his own; it was only a matter of time and the right gust of wind before I became my own storm, too

it has been almost twenty years, and I am still afraid of becoming my father

hiding him under carefully crafted metaphor does not change the fact that he has never been anything but hollow and vacant and abysmally cold

the kind of shadow who would listen to these words and be flattered that I took the time to write about him at all

he has lain claim on nothing but the hole in our living room floor

and my name.

I will not let him curse that, too

my name will not be a swear word on my own tongue.