As a child, I thought all fathers were the same.
Then I began to watch them.
A father teaching his son to ride a bicycle.
One holding his child’s hand. Because sometimes that alone is enough to tell him the world is a little less frightening.
One laughing with him about something no one will remember twenty years from now.
Tiny scenes.
So ordinary that almost no one notices them.
I do.
Because when something is missing from your life, you learn to recognize it everywhere.
My father left when I was still too young to truly understand what was happening.
And old enough to remember that, from one day to the next, there was simply an empty space—a space he never knew how to fill.
I remember no great speeches.
I remember no lessons.
I remember none of those ordinary things everyone else seems to take for granted.
Like someone saying, “Come here. I’ll show you how.”
There are things a son does not ask for.
He waits for them.
Because he assumes they will arrive on their own.
Then he grows up.
And realizes that some lessons were never postponed.
They were simply never coming.
For a long time, I believed what I lacked was a father.
With the years, I understood that what I lacked most was the idea of having had one.
Someone to butt heads with.
Someone to argue with.
Someone to surpass.
Someone to disappoint.
Even someone to rebel against.
Because that too, in the end, is love.
My mother did everything she could.
And probably far more.
These photographs are not about my father.
After all, he is not here.
They are about all those small gestures that go unnoticed until you are the one who never received them.
A hand.
A laugh.
A look.
A presence.
It is strange.
As children, we think the great milestones will be what builds a life.
Then you grow up and discover it was the tiny things.
The ones that never make it into family photographs because no one thinks they matter.
