dear dad, happy birthday. i'm not even sure how old you would be. i wish we were able to talk. i can't think how that even works, like if your dad was your friend, like if you had a closeness. like you just felt better being together. nearness. i'm still anxious now without you. but not like then with you. it would be nice to think that on some level we couldn't reach consciously, we did communicate, we did understand the other. trouble is we didn't have a guide, we didn't understand ourselves. it was always curtailed, trailing off in short sentences. oh how i wanted to be natural. how i felt little, and vast, and lost with you. look where it goes. i wanted to wish you a good birthday, but you were borne out of this place, and i don't know the date. maybe that's the one to wish on, the birthday of your vanishing. 
i know you didn't vanish. but for a boy that's how it seems. it seems to go beyond your deathday to when you disappeared from me, from when you were never here. there is no day for that. i'm here. thank you. i'm glad of that. you wouldn't believe what's going on here, or maybe you would. you were always a success, and you laid up some riches, and i wanted something different, something not money, to gather in something like honey. maybe you would believe that success is like survival now, maybe you would see, being free of the old system, that that way lay death. i can't close this, so i will keep it open. there never was anything definitive between us, it was a chasm. it seems a smaller chasm now. maybe any words i choose won't be wrong now you can't hear. maybe any words will be a bridge. love, me.