What it means to let go of a father

Sometimes, I wonder what it must feel like to have a father. Not in the biological sense, but in the human one.

A man whose presence isn’t a ghost with a phone number, but a shadow you can lean against when the world starts to break.

I remember being a child, listening to my classmates talk about weekends spent with their fathers… fixing broken toys, solving math problems over dinner, even just hearing their voices crackle through Skype lines from distant countries.

It sounded so small, so ordinary. But to me, it was mythic.

Then in university, watching as their fathers carried their burdens like sacred obligations, lifting the invisible weight from their daughters’ shoulders with a kind of grace I’ve never known. Even in adulthood, I saw it. The gentle way their fathers stood behind them, like tall walls that would never let the world come too close. They’d still lean on their fathers like children, like that love had no expiration date.

And I wondered: what does it feel like to be someone’s most protected thing?

I wouldn’t know. It’s a world I was never invited into. I have no such memories. Just vague fragments, mostly silence, and a few sharp edges.

Even writing about you feels hollow, counterfeit. What do I know of you?

You are a name. A phone call. A scary ghost. A question I stopped asking. A flicker of sound every twenty-one days. You are absence in the shape of a man. I do not know you. I only know abandonment. And the strange, quiet grief of being left by someone still alive.

I remember the day you returned… not as a father, but as a man who had lived twenty-five years elsewhere. You arrived in Amman like a stranger with a suitcase, and suddenly the house bent to make room for you.

I sat on the couch, locked inside my own mind, thoughts spinning like dead leaves in a storm. You moved through the kitchen like a foreign wind, disrupting the rhythm my mother had spent years perfecting. She showed you where everything was, again and again, as if years of absence could be wiped away by asking where the salt is.

And then you looked up from the clutter and asked me, “Why do you look like that? You’re so ugly when you’re sad.” I didn’t cry. Not then.

But I also didn’t know then that your words would scar me quietly, that they would teach me that sadness must be hidden even in the smallest bones of my face. That I should fold my grief into polite smiles. That my face must never betray me again. Now I study my reflection like it’s a map to danger. Every muscle in my face knows how to stay still.

You taught me that.

And maybe, deep down, I am grieving the father I invented. The one who’d meet my sorrow without flinching, say nothing but, “I’m here. I’ll carry it with you.”

In Arabic, we call that سند. Sanad. A foundation. A backbone. A shoulder that steadies you when your knees give in.

You never were that. You were never sanad.

It’s been four years since we last spoke. Still, I call it strength: the way I vanish, the way I prune people like dead branches.

They call it cold. They call it brave. I laugh and say: “I let go of my own father.What makes you think you’d weigh more than that?”

I didn’t even flinch. Not once.

Even now, when you twist the story for sympathy, I remain still. I do not chase. I do not correct.

But some nights, I think: if someone ever cracked my chest open, they’d find a little girl curled inside, still waiting at the airport gate, eyes wide, hoping this time you’ll stay. Still crying in secret when she hears you’re sick. Still hoping, despite everything, to be chosen.

But no one sees her. Because you taught me well: never let your sadness show. Never let grief touch your face. And for that, perhaps, I should thank you.

Because no one can help me carry the heaviness of this kind of loss. No one deserves to know.