An Open Letter to the Cowardly Lion

Of all my lies, you are by far the most difficult to face.

I was nine years old when you gave me the teddy bear. He was five-and-a-half feet tall, which meant he was a few scant inches shorter than you and stood miles and miles above me. His fur was staticky and coarse, not quite soft, and I loved him more than anything.

He lived in my bedroom, under my lofted bunk. There was a five-foot-wide beanbag on the ground and most nights I curled up there, arms and legs wrapped around my bear, still young enough that my back didn’t ache in the morning. 

Then there was a girlfriend, and she had a daughter who was five, and I loved her to my bone marrow. One weekend I came over and my bear was gone, and when we went to Shay’s house there he was, in her daughter’s room, and the bear was hers then because I knew what it was like to be given a gift like that; I wouldn’t dare take it away.

Of all my lies you are the hardest to face, because you could exist like this, shining and golden and everything I have ever wanted, forever and forever in my memory if I let you. If I could choose, I would pick out the very best parts of you and stitch you back together like Frankenstein’s monster. I would display you in a gallery like modern art, cast under spotlight at the very center of the exhibit. I want to worship this holy You. Because it is still truthful, that’s the thing—I never really lie about you. It’s mostly an omission of truths. I edit, I crop, I rearrange, I ignore. Always, I ignore the hot simmer of resentment and abandonment and childish anger, like Why aren’t you here, where have you gone, what did I do, why aren’t you taking care of me? If I could choose, I would bury all of it. I would keep the love. I would keep the times you stayed and forget all the times you left.

When I was ten your parole ended. I didn’t know what that meant, didn’t really understand where we were on the days I went with you to that office uptown to speak with your probation officer. All I knew was that you were sad that year even though you had just graduated college, and in the picture of us with you in your grad cap and me in my zebra print dress, I am grinning wide and bright the way I learned, and you are not even smiling. If I stare long enough I swear I can make out a gray cloud above your head. But I was used to your sadness, then. I didn’t know it could be fatal. 

When I was twelve, you disappeared. It was rehab, first, then a halfway house, then you moved into a little apartment that I visited every weekend, almost three hours from the town you raised me in. That lasted maybe six months, and then you bought the van. And then you said there were important things you needed to do. And then you were gone and there were only phone calls. And then those stopped, too. 

You never left completely. I suppose that was the hard part. There were sporadic messages on my phone, or a missed call at midnight now and again. Or once, when I was fourteen, you called and said you were driving through Colorado—I had moved south by then, with my mother—and I hyperventilated in the back of her car because I didn’t know how to tell you no. That I wanted you here or not at all. That I couldn’t handle never knowing when I would hear from you next, or when I would get the call that you turned up dead. My friend held my hand while I focused on my breathing. I told you I didn’t think I could make it work, and you knew what that meant.

You were the perfect father, before. For that first, shining decade, you were the father that everyone tells stories of. You were kind and patient and loving. You took us on drives and backpacking trips and AA picnics. You never shouted, not even once. At most you grumped, and we got to call you grizzly bear. There is so much truth to choose from that isn’t tainted by this ugly, swinging pendulum between here and not here, between father and ghost.

When I was fifteen, you went to the Dakota pipeline protests. When you texted me you said that it was beautiful to see so many people standing in solidarity for other human beings. You said the police were cruel; they used beanbag guns and tear gas and awful force. I told you that you had two children and I wanted you to come home. You got upset. You told me this was important. I wanted to ask, Aren’t we important? but I never said a damn thing.

Even now, I cannot speak a bad word against you. My throat closes up and my chest seizes and all I can think of is that time in the eighth grade when you called me in the middle of the night, saying I love you I’m sorry I love you I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry between heaving, desperate sobs, and I said it was okay because what else could I tell you, my father, half strangled on the other line? What else could I do but cradle your wounds? You said I’m sorry and you were crying and probably high, and I said it was okay even though I hadn’t seen you in six months and you didn’t answer my calls anymore and nothing in the goddamn world was okay, because it is all I have ever known how to do. Because I loved you, and I still believed that maybe if I stopped the bleeding you would just come home.

The truth is, I love you more than I have ever loved anyone. It runs deep in me, to the marrow, to the spirit, somewhere I can’t begin to touch or name.

The truth is, you are both the love of my life and my one great tragedy, and both crowns will be yours until the day that I die.

The truth is, you remind me of our childhood dog standing in the path of the sliding glass door. My brother and I with a grip on the handle, telling you, “in or out.” 

Of all my lies, you are the hardest one to face, because you aren’t here to prove me wrong anymore. You aren’t here to give the bear away or miss my calls. You can be whatever I want you to be, and no one will tell me any different because no one speaks ill of the dead—at least not in front of me.

The truth is, Daddy, I have all this love and it feels like a fresh blanket of snow over a shrapnel yard—pristine and sparkling and entirely deceptive. I have all this love and it is truthful, I swear, it is the purest thing I’ve ever felt, but it’s laid out over broken glass and rusted nails and twisted metal and so it still feels like lying. I am tired of loving you feeling like lying. I am tired of holding all this pain in my chest.

The truth is, the only thing that surprised me about your final leaving is that it was suicide, not an overdose, but this was not too different. I had prepared for abandonment, and that is what you gave me. At least you were consistent.

But that isn’t the full truth, either. It’s all so contradictory. How can I say that when you were here you were tall and constant as the steady oak, that you grounded me in a way no one else could, that you taught me how to ride a mountain bike and tie my shoes? How can I say that you held as much love as 40,000 aspens but it could become winter overnight, bare and desolate with all your leaves gone, my brother and I spinning across the dead ground, dizzy with whiplash? Then there would be only shadows of you, all the rest buried under frozen ground, my brother and I huddled and shivering while we waited for spring’s return. 

How can I say that you were both winter and summer? That you swung between polarizations, but the cold never negated anything. How do I say that I love you, that I would not change a thing about you, that I have accepted every inch of who you are, but somewhere in my chest there is a little girl crying because she misses her dad and no one will tell her where he truly went? Somewhere there is a little girl crying and you are the one who did it to her, and she still believes it’s her fault. How do I tell you that now? After everything?

How do I love you like this, and resent you like this, and miss you like this, with every fiber of my being. Why does anger still feel like betrayal, like I am killing you myself?

The truth is, there is anger in me, Daddy. There is so much rage that when I feel it rising up my throat I tamp it down forcefully, desperately, because I am so scared I’ll be overwhelmed by it. Drowned in it. There is so much of it, Daddy, a lifetime’s worth, and it is all for you, and there is nothing in the world that scares me more than being mad at you. Because being mad at you meant that look on your face, and that look meant you were leaving, and you were always, always leaving. 

The truth is I am angry, but I only find it when I go excavating for honesty and I so love to lie. I convince myself I’m not angry then scuff a toe in the soil and it all comes rushing up so violently I am taken off my feet, and then I can’t speak, can barely breathe, am frozen under all of it, all this fury that I haven’t the slightest idea how to get out of me. I want to break something I can see, throw dishes or smash a vase with a bat or set my house on fire. I want to break something the way you broke me, over and over again, just to feel the agony of it coming apart. But I am carefully contained. I am swallowing it all. I am telling you it’s okay. I am asking you to come home.

You know, for a while after you died, I could only write like this—in second person, like I was writing you letters. I wanted everything I wrote to be a conversation between you and me. But I never tell you the truth. And so for two years, I have been lying and lying and lying.

The truth is, I miss the bear you gifted me then gave away. I hate that he was there, and then suddenly he was gone. I hate that you were here, and now suddenly you are gone, and I wish you would stop taking things away. 

I remember the only time I ever said I hate you. I was young, eight or nine, before you started leaving, and we were arguing about something stupid. We were standing in the kitchen when the words left my mouth, and it felt like the entire world held its breath. The air froze; we stared at each other. You said, deadly calm and quiet, “No, you don’t.” And you were right, so I said I was sorry, and I never said those words again.

Daddy, I love you and I hate you and some part of me really does mean that, this time. So I will tell the truth, for once. I will let you hear it. You told me once in a letter that I would have to be strong to love you, and that was truthful. You have made me so strong, daddy, and I love you for that, but I hate you for it, too. I loathe and revere the parts of me that are you in equal measure. I swore, once, to love you unconditionally, and I have. I will. I love you and I hate you and I carry you laboriously, Daddy—like a promise worth keeping.

Taylor Little is a creative writing student in Colorado Springs, Colorado. They write poetry and creative nonfiction and have just begun to send out work. They have been published in the literary and arts journal riverrun.

A Song for Taylor