The Museum of Lost Love by Gary Barker

Author:Gary Barker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: World Editions
Published: 2019-04-26T07:04:00+00:00

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MUSEUM SUBMISSION 97-2010

He was everything to me. He cared for me, cooked for me, took me to the park, picked me up at ballet class, let me play Pretty, Pretty Princess with him. You spin the pointer to win jewelry and the one who gets all the pieces, including the tiara, wins. My friends loved that, especially when he won and he had all the princess jewelry on. We laughed so hard. I can still remember we all threw ourselves on my bed in laughter when my father wore the tiara.

It was just the two of us all those years after my mother left and moved to Australia. Then he met my stepmother. It’s such a horrible word.

I was twelve when it happened. I was smart enough to be critical of those Grimm brothers’ ideas of what a stepmother was. But things started to happen. He was not there for me. She wanted him all for herself and he wanted to be everything to her.

I swear I tried. It felt so cliché to hate my stepmother and yet there it is. All that was missing was for her to lure me into the woods and put me into a deep sleep.

But she was more subtle than that. I’m not sure she even knew she was doing it. She pushed his friends away and then me. I became the outsider in my childhood home.

I grew up and left. The twosome that my father and I had been all that time was gone.

I still see my father and stepmother, and it doesn’t hurt as much as it used to. They more or less accept me as I am. Or maybe it’s just that they ignore me as I am.

Still, something was lost along the way and I can’t help but think that it was taken from me without so much as an acknowledgment. I think there must be a tribe somewhere, maybe the one in the highlands in Central Africa where babies suck on their father’s nipples and are as likely to call out for their fathers as for their mothers. I bet they have a ritual for cases like mine. Where daughters of single fathers walk their fathers down the aisle and give them away or something like that.

In that tribe, I imagine that the daughters get to make their fathers wear a princess gown and a tiara. In case anyone wants to invent that ritual, I’m sending you the game, the old Pretty, Pretty Princess game that my father used to play with me. Back when he was mine.

Vancouver, Canada, 2010

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