Ari’s Reviews > Lion > Status Update

I know how to keep safe, how to tuck in, how to keep chaos at bay. I am still learning how to bathe in the soft Hieber a blood moon.

I used to say that being loved by my father was like being loved by a lighthouse. It went dark for a very long time and then you were dazzled by the stroke of the glancing beam. But I have come to realize that I was the steady one, searching the dark water in order to find someone to save… I was his lighthouse and my mother was my rock.

I am a young child and I already know that my father loves me utterly and yet without precision, that he is vague on the details of my life because he disdains the quotidian, because the focus of his attention is always somewhere just beyond the horizon. My mother loves me steadily as the ocean.

I have shorn myself of pain so that he may continue to bask in my love

I tell her he is a loving man who does not know how to be a father.

I ask him to come. I tell him I need him. I have never said this to him before.

He has not felt beloved for a long time, not on any shore.

He has never had to worry about me because I have never asked him to.

He spends his life leaping into the unknown, defying the laws that govern everyone else, and waiting for the consequences to catch up with him later.

I must protect them all from the ferocity of my feelings