-
awad: narrow – wednesday.27.2.08.

---

My father believes that if the U.S. hadn't gone into Vietnam, we'd all be be speaking Vietnamese today.
My father thinks that a lot of homeless people just like their freedom; he's expressed his opinion that global warming is a leftist commie conspiracy and a pile of horse shit. He's of the view that white people tend to be, in general, “just a bit smarter” than African-Americans. He believes that gay men are the product of overly doting mothers and unmasculine fathers.

My emotionally distant female parent died of breast cancer when I was thirteen. For all of my childhood and adolescence, Dad liked to take me, his only son, to action movies and monster truck rallies.

If I had come out during high school, there would have been a good chance that he'd have kicked me out. If I had come out while in college, he more than likely would have cut off my funding. So I figured back in eleventh grade that I would break the horrible news to him just after graduation from university.

My boyfriend for the previous three years left me for his ex one week after graduation, and, heartbroken and insecure, I was in no condition to face the narrow mind of my father. It's not just narrow, it's thick, and other people's attempts at persuasion through reason get lost in his seemingly endless layers of ignorance.

Now I'm twenty-four, with an awesome new man in my life, and it's time. It's just time, already, and all I have to do is speak the words to his ears. In my imagining, it goes like this:

“Dad, I'm gay.”

Silence. He stares.

“I have a great boyfriend named Justin. I admitted to myself when I was sixteen that I liked boys, and I told just a few friends and Olivia, and I wanted to tell you for all these years, but I was afraid to, and I –” I drop my voice a bit, even though we're at his house, in the kitchen, with no one to overhear. “I knew, that you deserved to know who I am.”

Confusion floods his eyes. Disgust is written all across his face. I stab at the quiet, groping for the right words. In the end he yells at me to get out, just get out.

On a beautiful and warm Friday night in October, I'm taking a sunset excursion around the lake with Justin. We're holding hands in companionable silence, and my stomach feels filled with butterflies and knotted rope. I'm a grown man, I shouldn't feel so terrified for what I'm going to do tomorrow. I'm going to drive the two hundred miles back to my hometown and deliver the fact to dear ol' Dad.

I'm approaching my apartment when my cell rings. The screen displays Olivia. “Hey sis, what's up.”

Her voice when she speaks does not match my calmness. “Asher, Asher, Dad had a stroke, I was there when it happened talking to him. It's a really big one and they don't think he'll make it.”

My heart crashes ten stories, and after a brief coma, Dad dies two days later.

I never did tell him who I was.

---

IMPORTANT – author's note: This is loosely based on a true story I once heard from someone. The details and embellishment of the tale are my original work, but the essential concept and message are not.