(it's still a little rough and needs some cleaning up so please be harsh! This piece is quite important to me so I'd really appreciate advice with it. thanks!)

You’re standing about three feet away from me, if I were to guess. Close enough to touch and yet it still feels like there’s a million miles separating us and I don’t think I’ve ever felt further from you. My eyes trace silently over your face. Following the lines I worked so hard to remember every day of the past years. You’re older than I remember. There are flecks or gray in your hair and faint wrinkles are beginning to etch themselves into your skin. You’re not as tall as I remember either. I’m tall, like you. The same height, the same olive coloured skin and dark hair. The same startling, green eyes as mine. All those little things we still have in common. The little things, that don’t really matter at all.

There are so many things I want to say to you. So many things that I need you to understand. It’s ironic that now I have the chance I don’t know where to even begin. That inevitable conversation hidden at the back of my mind that I’m not quite brave enough to bring out. Everything we never had was always just out of reach. Our pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Always just around the next corner, always just a few more steps in front, because neither of us had the courage to run that little bit faster, or push that little bit harder, and take it before it outran us both. So instead of trying to grasp feebly at meaningless words, I just stand in front of you, at a complete loss of what to do or say, mirroring you, while the silence seems to dance through the space between us with all the unspoken sentences, thoughts and feelings hanging in the air with nowhere to go.

Any words would have just felt empty and too small, yet I needed one of us to say something. Anything to fill the stretching silence. But then, I never thought it would be this hard. I never thought you would feel this much like a stranger to me. After all six years seems nothing when you stand it next to the rest of your life, but there’s something holding me back. Something in the way. Something stopping me from stepping forwards into your embrace and taking the moment I seem to have lived for, for all these years. Everything I don’t know about you has built up an invisible wall that’s impossible to climb over and impossible to break down. Instead we just stand before each other with silent tears leaving sad trails laced down our cheeks. I remember the last time I saw you and you wiped my tears away made me promise that you would never see me cry, and I made you promise you would come back. I guess in the end neither of us kept our word.

You make no move to wipe my tears away this time. You just watch the lonely trail they make on my face with the strangest expression. As if each tear explains everything you never understood. Maybe they do, so I watch yours too, desperately trying to find some answers.

Of course the memory of the last time I saw you is fading as fast as water slipping through open fingers. That does sound awfully clichéd, but there’s really no other way to put it. It’s getting further and further away until eventually there will be nothing left, and your face will blend into all the other tainted, smudged and forgotten ones and pushed to the back of my mind. I think that’s what hurts the most. The fact that I can’t keep up with how fast you’re fading, so I’m frantically trying to memorise the lines on your face all over again.

I wish I knew you. I wish that you knew me. Fathers are supposed to know their daughters. It’s the trivial things like my favourite ice-cream flavour or how I like my coffee, that seems to make all the difference now. It’s all about finding the clues. Little pieces that fit together, like a jigsaw, and create a person. Things we would know if you cared enough to come back.

I’m not trying to blame all of this on you, of course I’m not. It was just that blaming you was easier than blaming myself. Blaming myself would mean admitting I was wrong. That somehow your leaving was through my own selfish, thoughtless actions, but then everything I know about being selfish, I learned from you. I hated caring so much that I made myself hate you too. For walking out of my life and leaving me with regrets I told myself I would never have. Missing you became a state of mind instead of a gut feeling. It seemed almost impossible that you could exist or that the world could be big enough to hold the two of us so far apart. I used to wish I could step into your shoes and see things through your eyes and if you thought of me as much as I thought about you, and how things might have been different. But you can’t fight battles with wishes. Wishes don’t get you anywhere.

My love for you faded. Loving someone is giving them the power to break your heart, but trusting them not to and I realized that I never did quite trust you to keep my heart safe. Not really. I stopped chasing the rainbows. Instead of trying so hard to catch them I let them fade away into the lonely sky. And all the thoughts and feelings disappeared along with them so that all that’s left is nothing. I turn, silently, and walk away. I don’t need to look back to know that you’re doing the same and I wonder how we could have got it all so entirely wrong. Because in the end it, wasn’t worth the wait.