I dislike it when people try to comfort me. Comfort means feeling better, and there is no feeling better about something that will never get better.

My family used to be a whole.

I don't really remember what that was like.

I remember crying and screaming coming from beyond my bedroom door. I could never sleep through it, but I never wanted to get involved. So I didn't.

My father got to keep the house. My mother got to keep me. I got to go to a shrink. The shrink had a little sandbox filled with white sand on her desk, and the number on the front of the white building she worked in was 1109. Lots of white. It felt like black.

I visited my father on Thursdays and Saturdays, but a lot of the time I would call him and make an excuse not to go, because he would always make me sleep in my own room, and I was scared. On the days I did visit him I cried myself to sleep, because sleeping alone always made me miss sleeping between my parents.

When we moved away I visited my father during the summer. By the time he remarried and had two more children I only saw him and his new family for a few weeks every year.

They were a whole family. It was very pretty to look at, like a shiny Christmas present. But it wasn't mine. When I visited them I felt like a black speck inside a snow globe.

We try to call each other every weekend now. It's not something we succeed at. College keeps me busy, and even when it doesn't I don't feel compelled to call him. He doesn't really feel like my father anymore.

My family is broken, and a father is not something you can replace. You can live without one, but there is always an emptiness, and you can't know how that feels unless you've had to feel it yourself. So don't pretend to know what to say. How can you know what it's like to come from a broken home if your family has never been broken?