The night my father decided to erase me from existence was not filled with the chaotic shouting or the explosive violence one might expect from a family breaking apart. Instead it was defined by a terrifying and quiet certainty. At nineteen years old I stood in the shadows of our backyard and watched a man who was supposed to be my protector move with the cold efficiency of a stranger. He dragged the contents of my life out into the grass as if he had been rehearsing this betrayal for years. My clothes my beloved notebooks filled with dreams my sturdy work boots and the cheap laptop I had slaved away an entire summer to afford were all piled into a rusted metal barrel. He didn’t stop at my belongings he went for the things that carried the weight of my soul including my mothers old coffee mug and the framed graduation photo I had kept tucked away like a treasure. When he struck the match the flames rose with a hungry roar curling paper and warping plastic into blackened unrecognizable shapes. He looked at me through the heat and the haze and uttered words that were meant to break my spirit forever telling me that this was the inevitable consequence of my disobedience.
To my father I was never a person with an independent future or a mind of my own I was merely a source of labor a pair of hands tethered to his legacy. The argument that had ignited this bonfire of vanity started when I told him I was leaving to join a trade program in Columbus. I had a job lined up and a vision for a life that didn’t involve his shadow. He called me ungrateful selfish and weak but as I watched the smoke rise into the night sky I realized he was the one who was truly impoverished. What he didn’t know as he laughed at my supposed ruin was that I had already outsmarted him. Earlier that morning I had quietly moved my essential documents my meager savings and my acceptance letter into my friend Nates car. As the fire burned low and he told me that if I left I could never return I felt a strange sense of liberation. That was the last moment I viewed him as someone I needed. I left that night with forty three dollars a single backpack and a promise to myself that if I ever gained power I would never use it to destroy.
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