DEAR DIARY,
Tonight I have to write about Dad, which is difficult because the last time I saw him was at the trial (and we know how well THAT went) and Dr. Preston wants to know how I feel about him.
I must report with great sorrow, oh my dear diary and oh my dear doctor, that I don't know how I feel about Dad. Not really, anyway. Scared, sad, angry, defiant, sorrowful, apologetic, and lots more. Because he's really very complicated, and the way he hates me is especially complicated.
It'd be one thing if Dad was like Jim's ex-wife, and just hated mutants because of religion or something like that. He's not like that. Not really, anyway. He believes in a god, but not one that has anything to say about mutants in particular. It kind of freaks me out that he's been quoted in pamphlets by Humanity's Protectors, because while I know he does believe in what they want, I also know that he doesn't believe in it for the same reasons they do.
He's very opinionated, I guess you'd say, and there aren't a lot of people in the world who he thinks are better qualified to form opinions than he is. And his opinion, his honest and most strongly-held opinion, is that mutants are monsters. Not human. We just act human, and some of us look human, but we aren't, and pretending that we are will only hurt real humans. We're like, I don't know, some kind of human-eating beasts who will rampage through society and destroy everything real humans worked for, and that'll be the end of the world...unless we're stopped. It was a very cold, very matter-of-fact kind of hate, and supported by all kinds of rationalizations and explanations and so on. It's not the whole picture of what was in his head on the subject of mutants, but it's as much of it as I can put into words.
Then Mom died, and it was like someone turned on a floodlight behind that part of his thoughts, casting new shadows across everything in there and showing all the dark little threads running through the thoughts I'd gotten so familiar with. Because he really loved Mom, so much that it could be really scary, so much that he worried all the time about how to keep her safe from harm. And having her just die like that while leaving behind this horrible daughter of his who used to just be a constant source of worry and now started to look like some kind of nemesis, some foul egg that hatched into a poisonous viper right inside their nest, it really hurt him.
Which I guess is a way of saying that I really hurt him. He worried about me, a little bit for my own sake (at least, before he found out what I was), and a little bit for his own sake, but mostly because he knew Mom loved me and he wanted me to turn out well for her sake. And he was strict, because he thought that he knew that being strict was the best way to protect us all and make sure things worked out right.
He was also a smart man, good at figuring things out, and good at planning. So while he was grieving over Mom and looking for who to blame, his brain made that intuitive leap and assembled all the subtle strangenesses of my behavior into one firm conclusion: Mom died and I lived, I was a mutant, I'd been a mutant for years, mutants will destroy humanity, I killed Mom.
But like I said, Dad was coldly rational about this kind of thing. He wanted proof, because he wanted to be sure that he was doing the right thing. So he watched over those months until I slipped up, which I was practically guaranteed to do now that he was being so observant and I was such a wreck. And the night that he was firmly convinced of what I was, he felt really good about deciding to kill me, because it made sense and it seemed right. And I know it's crazy for anyone to think something like that, and at the same time I know because I was there that there wasn't anything in the world that could have made more sense, not to him.
I guess if you read a lot of the stuff I wrote in this diary, you'd think I hate Dad, and that's sort of true. But another thing to realize is that I spent every day from thirteen to sixteen worrying about what he was thinking. And not just worrying about it, but actually watching it. It's like earning a graduate degree, summa cum laude, in Darrell Johnson.
It's also like that guy who said that the more you know, the more you realize how little you know, because people's minds are totally easy if all you're doing is glancing at them but not at all easy if you spend a lot of time really studying them. So when I write things like "he felt really good about deciding to kill me," I'm not really being fair to Dad. He had more thoughts about what he was doing than I could ever write in this diary, more than I could really ever find words for, and all I'm doing is picking out a kind of consensus thought that I can explain in a way that'll make sense to someone else.
God, I'm just babbling here. I don't know how to say that I disagree with my dad but at the same time I find it hard to not agree with him and I'm scared of him and I love him and I wish he would forgive me and I didn't do anything wrong and all that other crap that I apparently can't say the right way. I don't need him, and I wake up sometimes thinking that I just felt him nearby and it leaves me shuddering and wanting to throw up. And I know I should never, ever talk with him again because it'll make me feel bad and make him feel worse, but sometimes I look at the phone and I think about calling anyway.
Maybe that's the pithy one-word summary for how I feel about Dad: conflicted. One word, accurate, cuts straight to the point, doesn't say anything worth saying.
I watch a lot of news reports now, and I read a lot of magazines, and part of me wants to say that people who hate mutants are all wacko bible-thumping freaks who think mutants are cursed by God, but I can't. I can't pass them off so easily, because Dad hates mutants, and he hates me more now than he ever loved me, and it's just not as easy as saying that he's ignorant and small-minded and scared and therefore must be wrong. He IS wrong, I know, but he's wrong in a way that makes a lot of sense to him and I don't know that it's possible for anyone to argue him out of it.
And not that Dad cares what I think, but I don't think I killed Mom. I don't remember doing it, and I absolutely don't remember wanting to hurt her or do anything to her. I remember being frustrated and sad and disappointed because she knew I wasn't going to get what I wanted and didn't want to tell me, but I've been frustrated and sad and disappointed lots of times and never did anything then, so why would that time have been any different? But it scares me, because Dad really believes that it was me, that it was my fault, and I can't remember anything to say differently. I keep hoping I'll suddenly remember a cat running across the street and Mom swerving to avoid it, something like that, but I just don't remember anything at all about the accident.