Father

I never knew my father.

As a child I assembled his image from fuzzy gray snapshots with dog-eared corners.

For me he'd forever be twenty-six. Handsome, with a square jaw and kind eyes. I knew with a certainty I carried from childhood that someday I'd meet him. He'd look at me and everything would finally make sense.

"You're just like your father," my mother would say, and I'd feel him move somewhere inside me.

One day as I paged through a magazine I saw a man whose name seemed familiar. My father's friend. This man had known my father. He'd looked into my father's eyes; heard my father's voice; perhaps heard my father's hopes and fears for the child my mother carried.

The man in the picture was so much older than the ghost I called my father.

And suddenly I knew it.

My father would never know he'd had a daughter. Never know the girl who loved to read and walk in the woods and hear the songs of birds.

Never know the girl who dreamed each night of being rescued.