I was a daddy’s girl.
Maybe I had a sixth sense, but I think I recognized his loneliness even before I saw it in myself.
CAN YOU REACH THE LEAVES? BY ALEXANDRIA GREEN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 131
My father would push me on the tire swing in our front yard and my toes would almost reach the tree leaves.
“Did you reach the leaves?” he would ask and I would laugh, and it became our game.
Even though I was scared to go that high, I would laugh, a mixture of confusion and delight, as I dared to extend my toes just a fraction more. We weren’t going to stop swinging until I reached the leaves.
Daddy would push me so high that I could see the top of the house roof. I could see the chalk drawings on the driveway, and the pink bike with purple streamers on the handles and training wheels. But as a five-year-old I never saw the peeling paint, or the rusted swing-set, the handed-down red truck in the driveway, or the pedophile who lived across the street.
And the tree that I swung from, I didn’t know if it was old or what species it was, or even whether it was beautiful or ugly. I only saw its leaves, and the tips of my toes trying to reach them.
I was born the day my father’s sister died. The doctors cut me out of my mother’s womb, an emergency C-section. In the hospital just a few hallways down my aunt lost her battle with cancer.
I never thought that was a sad story. I thought that my father’s sister couldn’t have died at a better time, such is the mind of child. I pictured my mother holding an infant me, still drowsyy from her pain meds, my father sitting in a faux-leather armchair by her side, while a doctor gave them the news. Sure, they probably cried, but then I imagined they would look at me, their tiny chalk-white, rosy-lipped baby and they would think or maybe say out loud, “A life for a life.”
I was a daddy’s girl. My father raised me on Clint Eastwood, Gladiator, and the Matrix. I had probably seen more gore at the age of eight than many 14-year-olds. I never saw a chick flick until I was a teenager.