This story begins, as many of my stories do, down South. But not in my mother’s Mississippi, but my biological dad’s Arkansas. The year is 1984. I am six years old.

1984 will turn out to be a big year for me. In January, I will watch my hometown Raiders win a Super Bowl. I will finally get a sliver glove like Michael Jackson. Later that summer, I will watch the Olympic torch being carried through the streets and watch the World Olympics a short drive from my home. It will, by all measurements, be a year that changes my life.

But a large part of that change occurs that summer. Before the Olympics rolls into town, my mother and stepdad put me on a plane to visit by bio-dad, who I called “Other” (as in “Other Dad”) in Arkansas.

I remember the Delta flight. Mom walking me on the plane, the stewardess walking me to my next gate at Dallas-Ft. Worth, and the puddle jumper that gets me to Little Rock. I remember being excited, nervous, all of the emotions. I did not remember that years before, he had kidnapped me, taking be across state lines from California to Arkansas without my mother’s permission or knowledge. I did remember, fuzzily, the plane ride back, and the Pawberry Punch Delta had, which was basically fruit punch.

But this is the first time I am fully cognizant of the fact that I’m staying with my Other, in a new place. I am told that some of my cousins are coming along too, and these are also new people for me. Cousins from Chicago! Cousins from Sacramento!

I’m there two weeks.

To say that the day in particular is the only thing I remember would be a lie; I experienced a lot of new things in those two weeks. I remember drinking my first beer, shooting with his rifle, the sticky heat of an Arkansas summer. I remember the pornographic magazines and videos laying around the house, but that’s another writing exercise.

I remember riding around with him, the memory seared both in my memory and on the backs of my thighs as hot leather seats know no mercy. To the store, to the monuments of his hometown, like his high school and the three brick foundries in town. I was underfoot for a full week, and I didn’t know it then, but that was more than Other could take.

One afternoon, we go over to my grandparents’ house. I couldn’t have voiced it then, or figured out what was off, but I felt out of sorts there. Later, I could identify it pretty plainly as they just didn’t like me. They didn’t like my mother, and thus, didn’t like me. The issue of my blood could not be denied; I looked like my father, and my uncles, so I couldn’t be disowned. I had my father’s name, so the issue of my parentage couldn’t be questioned. But I wasn’t welcome in that house, and shortly after getting there, and finding none of the amusements Other had at home, like a color TV, music, air conditioning and so on, I wanted to get back to his house.

I remember him heading out to his truck, and me trailing along, expecting to go somewhere. He climbed behind the wheel, and waved me away from the passenger side.

“I’ll be right back.”

Never mind my confusion; where could you go that I haven’t been going? What new thing are you going to do? I had no idea what was going on. Confused, I stumbled away while he backed his truck out of the yard and Grandma called me to come inside.

He didn’t wave, I do remember that.

I sat on that porch’s waiting for him to come back. Sat on a metal chair, in Arkansas summer, height of the mosquito season, thirsty and hungry. Grandma would call me to come in, but never came out to collect me. Kind of a halfhearted “well, I TOLD him to come in” plausible deniability later when the thirty-plus mosquito bites surfaced.

He left in the afternoon. I sat there til the sun went down, watching the road, waiting for the truck to reappear.

Other came back the next afternoon. I hadn’t eaten. Hadn’t bathed. Slept in fits in an unfamiliar, old-person-smell house.

And acted like the last day hadn’t happened. We went to get hamburgers, and he was his usual self.

Had I been older, I could have found the words. Where did you go? Why were you gone so long?

But most importantly, why did you leave me?

Since then, my personal history is rife with people disappearing on me. Close, personal, intimate friends dropping contact. A woman who saw me through my divorce stops responding to texts and emails. Someone who I shared weeks in a summer program ends up going to the same college I do…avoids me all year. One of my best friends in 5th grade tells me, abruptly, not to talk to him ever again. And eventually, it all repeats. “We’ll be friends forever,” they say, and I tell them to never say never. Because I assume they have one foot out the door as well.

My story doesn’t have the “he never came back” ending, true, but he was the first lesson in my life that, no matter how much you love, hold close…people will leave your ass with no warning. And the way my brain works, I will wonder why, and then figure it’s my fault. I did something. I was a bother. I was in the way. It’s happened SO MANY TIMES in my life.

On Twitter I wrote out that I had abandonment issues’ nd to write it and see it was..cathartic. To admit that I have an issue, and this is the root of it, and this is how it makes me think and react and remember is..well, it hurts and is vulnerable.

But at least I can put words to it. I can remember how I feel about it. And I can remember that it’s not my fault, even if my brain chemistry tells me that it is. Naming the fear, naming the problem, somehow blunts its fangs, I guess.