I never Learned (What Love Isn’t)

Because my father was too busy at the big city dealership from five in the morning until ten at night, fixing cars and beating himself to death in a non air conditioned metal box, to come home and play basketball with his youngest daughter, but he deflects anyone who dares to question him (primarily me) by citing the roof above our heads and the food in the fridge, as if, in a world of commodity and middle class bare minimum, the basic needs of a human could justify emotional neglect, but I suppose that this absence of a father figure has its unique benefits because there is no one around to polish a shotgun when an older boy whom I barely know pulls up into our dimly lit driveway with a spray bottle of shaken-not-stirred mixed liquors, a lighter he pilfered from his father, and a lean body charged with testosterone at the ready - maybe he knew what was coming, or maybe he didn’t, but I’m positive it stunned him when on just our second date to the local mall he received not just a spontaneous kiss, but a half hour of horrendous backseat sex; I discovered, in the vacant lot of Mills Park during the dead of winter with my head on his naked thigh and a brain drowning in nicotine poisoning, that I wanted to call this strange boy “daddy” - that I wanted him to protect me and care for me, that I could possibly feed off his resentment for me when I inevitably became attached and desperate for any crumb of affection, that I could wallow comfortably in predictable sorrow and angst when he abandoned me in favor of boot camp in San Diego, just as he promised he would, because nothing burns so damn good as when a man tells me that he just doesn’t love me.

Anna Louise Steig is a young writer from the Appalachian hills of Western Maryland. She will be attending Shepherd University in fall 2023 as an English major.