Thy father who art in a hell that he created for himself and in my opinion fucking deserves it.

I ran into my biological father the other day while I was at the supermarket showing my new house mate around. Wow, talk about awkward. I didn't introduce them to each other because I didn't think it would be worth it. What would I say, "House mate, this is my estranged father, estranged father this is my house mate. I hope you never meet again because then it will mean that I will have seen the estranged father again and I'm just not comfortable with that. It is nothing against you, house mate, and trust me when I say that you would be better off not knowing him".

It was awkward man, it was weird. He kept asking me questions, like where I was living and where I worked and I was not inclined to tell him on the off chance that he would just turn up one day. I do not think that he has anywhere to live and as much as it pains me as a person, I could not offer him my couch because I would rather that he slept out in the cold. That way he might get pneumonia and die, and then we would all be rid of him. He is a bitter and angry man and desperately unhappy and to tell you the truth it lightens my soul to know this.

My childhood memories of him include him pacing, walking for hours for whatever reason be it collecting money he'd loaned to people or more likely, collecting money people had loaned to him and me, crying and unable to understand why he was so angry at everything. Him swearing under his breath, telling me to hurry the fuck up.

I regularly give money to one of the many homeless junkies in my area, not because I want to support his habit but because he is nice. He says please and thank you and seems to be almost embarrassed to ask for spare change. When he smiles at me he makes me feel like I have done something right, even if what I'm doing is helping a man kill himself, slowly, day by day. I would not offer my father any money because he's the sort of person that would resent being given anything. But he would take it just the same and utter false promises to pay it back, but never would.

My father is grey and gaunt like a junkie, his teeth are black stumps and his hair is long and greasy. His eyes are cruel and sharp and despise everything that they see, they are jealous of people who worked hard for what they have and people who haven't worked at all. I don't know if he's ever held down a proper job, he is a musician and used to work in the film industry. Apparently he was good at what he did but fell out of favour because of his toxic personality.

Sometimes I meet people who have never met their fathers and sometimes I envy them, I have met mine and what's worse, I know exactly what sort of person he is. I am sometimes ashamed to be of the same blood of him.

Another one of my child hood memories is being told to stay in the lounge room with my sister while my mother and father fought and when the noise got too much I remember rushing in to find her pinned up against a wall, his hand around her throat, one hand cocked back ready to strike her. I remember punching him in the balls to get him off her. Later, one of his friends tried to tell me that you should never hit a man 'there' but they never once mentioned that you should never hit a woman. No one ever mentioned it to my father either, and if they did, it never stopped him.

I have never wanted to kick the shit out of anyone so vehemently as I have my father. I used to think that one day it would end with a show down between the two of us and I would kill him, strangle him with my bare hands or maybe stove his head in with a brick but this is not how it will end. It will end with me at his funeral trying to suppress a smile, the only reason I will be there will be to watch his coffin get lowered into the ground so that I can be certain that he is dead.

In the supermarket he must have sensed how much I did not want to speak to him, it took him a few minutes but he seemed to get it in the end. He kept picking things out of my basket and asking me about them, "Is this the soap you use?" he'd ask and I would reply with one word answers, not giving anything away, not giving an inch. We parted, he arm raised slightly like would try and shake my hand but he must have realised that I would not. I realised this might be the last time I saw him alive but I did not care. A look of hurt flashed briefly in his eyes, hurt and regret. It was not enough and never would be.

He does not realise but he has given me a gift and that gift is hate. Hatred for him, hatred for everything that he stands for, hatred for everything that he ever was and has ever done. This is a gift that will burn with a biblical intensity and last just a bit longer than he will, when he is gone it will burn out and and with it will burn the part of my soul that he inhabited and leave it clean and new like fresh tissue, tender and young, ready to be used again for something else, something new, ready to grow again and cover what was once a wound. It will free up that part of my heart that was once reserved only for anger, free it up to be used for something beautiful, something wonderful, something pure and untainted, like grass grows after a bush fire, new green shoots pushing up through the blackened earth.