my dad didn’t do anything halfway.
he loved loud. corrected strangers. argued with confidence and hugged like he meant it.
he said “i love you” like a declaration. like a hypothesis he’d already tested. and proven true.
he was warm. and brilliant. and impossible to ignore.
the kind of man who thought effort should leave a mark.
my favorite kind of exhausting.

he taught me how to interrogate authority. challenge assumptions. never trust a man who says he’s just playing devil’s advocate.
he taught me that asking the right question is better than pretending to have the right answer.
he taught me how to be exacting. and curious. and a little bit insufferable.
(you’re welcome.)

he believed in me with a kind of reckless certainty.
i was on a rec soccer team. not varsity. not competitive. just vibes and wildly uneven talent.
but he told me i was good. like, really good.
so i tried out for an elite girls team i had absolutely no business being at tryouts for.
they were running footwork drills with military precision.
i got winded during the warm-up and briefly forgot which direction we were supposed to be kicking.
one girl had cleats with her name stitched on them.
i showed up with borrowed shin guards and blind confidence.
i had no business being there.
i was completely out of my depth.
and still, when they didn’t ask me to join, i was shocked.
because he said i belonged there.
and when he said things like that, i believed him.
that level of delusion stuck.
now i’ve got a five-year-old who genuinely believes he is the second best basketball player in the world.
he will fight you on it.
and i won’t stop him.

my dad also, for reasons known only to him and possibly the retail gods, had a target barcode scanner gun at his house.
we found it the morning after he died.
just sitting there.
no explanation. no receipt. obviously.
a full-on inventory device next to his stack of peer-reviewed journals.
like that made perfect sense.
and somehow, it kind of did.

this is also the man who once explained persistence by saying a single drop of water is nothing.
…but if you spit in the same place every day, eventually it becomes a puddle.
then a flood.
then an ocean.
and eventually, people have to deal with it.

their socks get wet. their rules stop working.
they’ve got mold in the walls. and it’s learning their names.
you were just existing. but now you’ve created a problem they can’t ignore.
congratulations. you’ve become inconvenient on purpose.

and he had my back.
when a mom on my soccer team accused me of cussing at her during a game, he didn’t flinch.
he looked her dead in the eye and said, “my daughter would never.”
then turned to me after she left and winked.
he knew i did.
and he also knew she probably deserved it.

he never asked me to soften. or behave.
he never told me to be likable.
he told me to be right.
and to stay that way. even when people got uncomfortable.

my dad died in 2012. i don’t have to look up the date.
my body remembers. it queues up the grief like a seasonal playlist.
june hits. and suddenly i’m nostalgic. and pissed off. and soft. and sharp. all at once.

and when i lost him, the silence wasn’t just absence. it was erasure.
a whole category of love vanished.

every father’s day, i scroll past tributes and reminders and cherish every moment captions and i want to throw my phone into the ocean.
but i don’t.
i just sit with it.
let it ache.
let it remind me.
and then i write things like this.

i don’t need a tribute post to remember him.
but this is one. obviously.
because he’s in my bones.
he’s in the way i love my son without dimming.
he’s in the way i say hard things out loud. and refuse to apologize for the echo.

i’m just writing this.
for me.
for him.
for the girl who sat by a hospital bed holding a hand that had stopped holding her back.

grief doesn’t fade. it just changes clothes.
some days it shows up dressed like anger.
other days, like tenderness.
and sometimes, like certainty.
he’s still here. just not in ways anyone else can see.

he lives in the questions i ask. the stories i tell. the way i choose to be too much, on purpose.

so happy father’s day to the man who made me inconvenient. brilliant. stubborn. and completely unequipped to tolerate bullshit.
you were the loudest love i’ve ever known.
you still are.

in college, i once called him crying. full-body, can’t-get-the-words-out crying.
because of a fight with a friend.
before i could even explain what was wrong, he interrupted. calm as ever.
“are you pregnant?”
i wasn’t.
but i started laughing.

he wasn’t trying to be funny.
he just wanted to know what kind of problem we were dealing with.
and i miss that more than anything.