I pull out photos of myself sometimes. It’s like a collection of a hundred different people. None of them me.

Here I am climbing a glacier. Or navigating class III rapids on a river in Alaska. Singing harmonies on stage.

I don’t even own crampons (or a boat) anymore. And haven’t picked up an instrument in half a decade.

I’m obsessive. When picking up a new hobby, I go all-out. And, most my life, it’s come easy.

It makes me wonder about ten, twenty years from now. Will I run? Will I even write? Will people who currently make up the fabric of my existence get a Christmas card in the mail, or find themselves floundering in some even lower indicator of “friendship?”

***

My dad wasn’t the same twenty-seven years later. He wasn’t with the same woman. But he was still active in her kids’ lives. He showed me pictures of his “grandkids,” bragging how far his littlest could throw a baseball.

He took me out for a burger. And I later learned he’d had to sell weed to afford it.

But, after all this time, we didn’t talk about the years we’d missed out on. We didn’t hug, shaking violently as we sobbed together in the booth. We just sat there. And he made excuses as I watched this sad man identifying with stories he’d been repeating for decades.

I wanted to shout. To demand answers. Why did you abandon me in the driveway? Why did I have to feel, most my life, so unlovable even my own father wanted nothing to do with me? Why didn’t you call?

The answers wouldn’t come, though.

Even if I screamed. Even if I stood in public and shook him, eyes popping out cartoonishly, this man could never give me what I wanted. Maybe when it came to his real flesh-and-blood child, what he saw, instead of a son, were his own failures?

The code imbedded in the stuff coursing through our veins didn’t matter. We weren’t family. We were imposters. Both of us.

And I had a moment. An ancient feeling of my own invention attempting to reach out and trip me up, there at the diner. But then, like most things, it passed.

Tyler Dempsey is the author of Consumption & Other Vices, Will We All Still See Each Other Afterward, and Follow the Brush. He is the host of Another Fucking Writing Podcast . Find his work in Glimmer Train and in Soft Cartel Magazine and appears in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Five:2:One Magazine, Wilderness House Literary Review and Gone Lawn amongst others.