What Forgiveness Revealed

I spent my years wondering,
Do you see me.
Questioning whether I still exist,
In your world.
Do you have any recollection,
That I was daddy's little girl?
But my presence was never acknowledged.
I was the child left uncalled,
The daughter forgotten.
I sat inside ordinary conversations,
Quietly envying what they received.
A father asking about their lives.
A father remembering their names.
A father showing up
In the small ways, a child carries forever.
Yet my name never rolled off your tongue,
As though I'd been erased from your subconscious.

So, I built an inner sanctuary.
My lips learned the discipline of freezing.
Silence felt safer than speaking in vain,
Because being unseen felt heavier than pain.
A beautiful prison is what I made.
And little by little parts of me drifted away,
As though my very mind
Had been placed on suspension,
Waiting for permission to resume its position.
Eventually maturity taught me a truth I resisted:
My father's wounds became his language,
But his language became my pain.
He wasn't withholding love,
He was loving me through a language
Too broken to translate.

And in time,
I became responsible for my own healing.
I learned that your unresolved pain shaped the man you became,
But your inability to see my needs,
And your unwillingness to face the inheritance of generational grief,
Shaped the woman in me.
Because trauma never disappears.
It echoes.
It migrates.
It introduces itself to future generations
Through silence
Through hesitation,
Through unfinished conversations.

I was the daughter you failed to see.
Because I mirrored who you used to be.
That loneliness you kept inside,
Was the same loneliness I learned to hide.
Criticizing reflections while avoiding our own.
Suppressing wisdom.
Masking fear.
Burying tenderness beneath our pride.
And somehow,
Our suffering found a way to speak anyway.
In our teeth.
In our bones.
In the weight we carried long after we'd grown.
And we wonder why rest feels strange.
Why the body remembers what our minds try to explain away.

I know how old this may sound.
But I forgive you.
Not because the absence didn't matter.
But because beneath the man I spent years grieving,
Along the way I found a wounded child.
A child who was never taught how to receive love.
A child who was never shown how to express it.
And suddenly,
I stopped asking you to become who I needed,
And simply learned to love you
For whom you knew how to be.

It's time to let clairvoyance,
To wash across your eyes.
Beyond the silence,
Past my skin.
Beneath the depths of my performed strength.
I am still your daughter.
I carry your features.
I carry your name in places you may never see.
Inner stand,
My mind has been in captivity for quite some time.
So,
If you ever hold my heart again,
Hold it gently.
Because when it comes to you,
Even the slightest pressure can leave a bruise easily.
I love you anyway.
Because within your wounds,
I recognized my own.
And in healing mine
I finally found home.