“Well, why can’t you be straight?!!!!!”
I yelled, the fiery resentfulness residing in my words.

I tried to look away as my father stared back at me.
He looked as if he had witnessed a painful death, for he was grieving in a way.

A shocked disbelief beyond words was written on his pale face, the pain present in his big brown eyes, which I remembered as two blurry pools of mud.

I recalled this whenever I looked back on that hateful, uproar of a night at the dinner table.

I ran upstairs to my room and slammed the door.
I threw myself on my bed and cried, bawling like the poor little baby I always was.

I wept until the tears stopped coming, which didn’t happen soon.
By the time I fell asleep, I was worn out and broken, not to mention lost.

In a sense, something did die that night.
An unspoken secret that was held between us for as long as I knew it.
But it was never said until now.

The wall between my father and I was not broken; if anything, it grew harder and thicker.