Jacob means struggle. Adam means earth. Benjamin means my right hand. Isaac means laughter
Once there was a man who didn't have a perfect father. He didn’t talk about it much, he wasn't one to complain, but he thought to himself: when I'm a father, I'll be different. And then the baby was coming. And then the baby came.
Tiny specific miracle. 7 pound boy. The particular joy in this young father's heart you cannot even imagine. Every day they played together. The father would pretend to be a giant, swinging his son on his shoulders, or a dog on all fours, or a bear. This made the boy happy endlessly.
They also wrestled. The man always won. The boy found this humiliating. He was humiliated not only because he lost but also because he did not understand why he wanted so badly to win over his father, whom he loved, whose forearms were larger than his thighs. Neither did the loving father understand his need to triumph over his son.
When the boy turned 18, summer between junior and senior year, he shot up 6 inches like an explosion. The two continued to wrestle. The boy eagerly, furtively looked forward to humiliating his father. One evening he hooked his leg behind his father's calf and forced his bare knees to the wooden floor. He got what he wanted. Stop said the father, please.
The next morning. A breakfast like any other. Watching dad eat granola. Can you imagine your dad eating granola? Not the neat clusters at the top. The bottom part that's just crumbs. And your dad doesn't want to get up and grab a spoon. He’s reaching into the banged-up plastic bag, scooping out a few humiliating loose oats, and some of them get stuck on his fingers, so he licks them off. And then he touches his phone, he touches his phone with his fingers that have saliva on them, and meets his son's eyes in the cruel spilled-over morning light.
You won. Congratulations. So why do you feel like you have lost? Because man would like to be an egoist and cannot. This is the most striking characteristic of his wretchedness and also the source of his greatness. When a chimp kills its father, it's good riddance. When a man kills his father, he cries forever. What should our boy have done instead? Should he have conceded? Should he have held back his strength? No. That would be killing himself. Should he have been extra gentle and obedient post-hoc? That would be delusion, which is worse than death. What he should have done was travel back in time. At the exact moment that he was equal to his father in strength, he should have said: I love you daddy. You gave me life and now I can take it. Tell me you love me too. But to have wished for one’s father to tell them something? If he could, it would have already happened.
And now the baby is coming. Half the size of a fingernail, the doctor says. Every time he hears that he looks down at his cuticles. And now you see how precise and inaccurate life makes room for life once more.
Thanks for reading. I'm trying this new thing where I don't reread any of my writing after I publish it but I force myself to publish something every day. See you tomorrow.
And thanks to Andy Kong and James Hill-Khurana for their edits on this story.