Today, had he lived past 67, would have been my father’s 72nd birthday.

I’ve been working on a blog post for weeks now. A childhood recollection of the time my dad, for no reason, almost drowned Simon, our pet cat. Well, the cat bit him as he was attempting to give him a bath so he held him under the bathwater. He pulled him up a few times for a few seconds only to plunge him back under. The memory of the bubbling water and the horrific sounds my cat was making are clear as can be some thirty years later. He didn’t drown Simon. Eventually he threw him, literally, into the hallway. Later on he would tell me, as if it made him sound heroic, that the only reason he didn’t go through with killing the family pet was because my brother and I were pleading with him not to. And sure, some kids might have physically put themselves between their father and the tiny animal he was brutalizing but even at six years old I knew better.

There are so many other stories. Ones that don’t have points or happy endings or discernible lessons just awful things that happened to me and us that I’m sure on every level fuck me up to this day. I keep running lists, but even jotting down “Simon – bath” is enough to piss me off, to set my thoughts off in a certain direction that I simply do not want to be. And therein lies the trouble of it all.

-Cassandra