Monologue by A.Powell 🌸

I guess the thing that hurts the most is how easily she said it—

“You remind me of Dad.”

Like it was an insult.

Like it was supposed to shut me up, corner me, shrink me back into the role they wrote for me years before I ever learned to speak.

And I finally get it now.

Why my father has been telling the same story over and over, like a scratched record he can’t stop replaying.

I used to think he was stuck.

Now I realize he was trying to convince someone—anyone—that he wasn’t the monster they painted him to be.

But they got to her first.

My mother.

My mother’s sisters.

The whole chorus line of women who perfected the craft of rewriting history to suit the versions of themselves they could sleep with at night.

They raised her on their version of him.

Seasoned every memory with their bitterness, marinated her whole childhood in their pain until she could swear it was hers.

And now here we are.

Sisters by blood, strangers by story.

She looks at me like I’m the enemy, like his shadow clings to me, like I’m carrying the parts of him she was told to hate.

And maybe I am.

Maybe I inherited the questions.

The doubt.

The nerve to say “this doesn’t feel right.”

But what she doesn’t see—what she refuses to see—is that he abandoned me.

Me.

He left me standing in the cold with empty hands and a full heart that didn’t know how to stop wanting him.

But he reached out to her.

The younger one.

The softer one.

The one they kept close.

He gave her money.

He gave her time.

He gave her the kind of attention I had to beg for in silence.

And she still thinks she suffered more.

She still believes the stories they fed her.

Still believes he was the villain and they were the wounded saints clutching rosaries and recounting his sins.

But now I see it with clearer eyes:

The villainy was never his alone.

It lived in the stories they told us.

In the way they divided us.

In the way they taught her to fear being anything like him…

and taught me to be ashamed of loving him at all.

So yes, maybe I do remind her of my father.

Maybe that’s why she can’t look at me without flinching.

Not because I’m him—

but because I’m the truth she has spent her whole life trying not to hear.

And maybe the real brokenness between us isn’t the things we said or the distance we let grow.

Maybe it’s the fact that she and I were raised on two different stories about the same man—

and now we’re both too hurt, too proud, or too tired

to search for the one that was real.

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