Eyes blue like hers

I walk up next to my dad as he sits in the living room chair that has the wooden arms. I take his ear lobe between my thumb and forefinger and count the old uneven piercings that dot the little piece of flesh like past lives. When I am finished counting the almost closed holes I move to the tattoos on his arm which have faded to an unrecognizable pink.

If you did not know they were there you would almost disregard them as variations in his skin tone but my trained eye finds them and makes out their old shapes. I know the shapes of my dad’s life because I have seen some of them and he has told me about the ones that I am fortunate not to have seen.

He told me that he did not know how to be a good person before he met my mom, that nobody ever taught him. He told me that he did not know he shouldn’t swear at school until the principal beat him and that for a while he thought his mother was a housekeeper.

I believe him.

I look at his eyes that are blue like mine and remember that our eyes are blue like his mother's eyes were. I miss her eyes even though those eyes did not necessarily teach my father how to be a good person but they did teach him how to be my dad.

I needed him to be my dad even though I scream like him and say things that are shameful when I get mad. Just like our eyes, I believe my grandmother had a hand in giving us this too.

My dad’s eyes always choose me and that’s something my grandmother did not teach him. Or maybe she did because she never chose him. She never chose us.

I say us because she didn’t choose me even though my eyes are blue like theirs and our skin tones were the only ones on that side of the family that matched hers. Everyone else had colors of pink in the undertones of their flesh but he, her, and I did not.

I think the pain of not being chosen is still there for him. It’s kind of like those piercings and tattoos. To the untrained eye, the pain of estrangement blends in with all the other pain that comes with life but with my blue eyes, I see it.