“Do what?”
“Run off and choose a life like that. People talk.”
There it was again. People. Never are you safe. Never what do you want. Just people.
“I’m not doing this for people,” I said.
“That,” he replied, “is exactly the problem.”
We didn’t yell. We never yelled. Our arguments were quieter than that. More precise. Less like blows and more like cuts.
The day I left for training, he didn’t come to the airport.
My mother did. She hugged me longer than usual and said, “You can still change your mind.”
“I won’t,” I said.
Training was hard, but not in the way civilians usually imagine. The physical part is obvious. The real difficulty is the quiet, when your body finally stops moving and the mind is left alone with everything it brought from home.
I wrote letters to him I never sent.
Dear Dad, I made it through today.
Dear Dad, you were wrong.
Dear Dad, I wish you had asked why.
Years passed. Deployments came and went. I learned how to make decisions under pressure, how to carry responsibility without applause, how to endure being misunderstood without making a spectacle of correcting it.