Hey diary, guess who’s back and all grown up.

I met Dad today.
I wish I could close this book right here, full stop, but that would be lying by omission. And I’ve lied to myself too many times already.

I thought about not even reading his letter, letting the fantasy stay intact — that maybe he had mellowed with age, maybe absence had made his heart grow kinder, maybe he could see me the way I have fought so hard to see myself. But fantasy doesn’t survive contact with reality.

He didn’t recognize me at all. Just a random woman at the bar drinking her favorite cocktail. It took me a good moment to realize he was actually hitting on me. I gotta say, that’s both disgusting and validating at the same time.

When I told him who I was, his face contorted in palpable disgust. Like I’d spilled something foul across his drink. He said he didn’t have a daughter. He said it… my dead name. As if he was carving it into me. Over and over. With a dagger.

I told him the truth. That I was his daughter, that I’d been living as a woman for three years, that surgery was on the horizon. I said it all as plain as breath. He sneered at me, accused me of playing dress-up, of being a predator, of humiliating him with some “sick joke.”

And then he dismissed me. Not like a child being sent away, but like a stranger being ejected.
“Go away.”
“Leave me alone.”
“I don’t have a daughter.”

That was the last thing he gave me. Not recognition. Not even anger worth keeping. Just erasure.

I walked out of that bar feeling like I was 2 years old again — unseen, unheard, forgotten. Except now I’m grown, and I know what he took from me. What he refused to give.

It’s strange. I thought rejection would feel like death. Instead it feels like gravity. Heavy, constant, unavoidable. I carry it now. But I am still standing. I am still Helen.