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Today was the inevitable: the call home. Mom always initiates it, checking up on me with her blanket-voice, leaving a message that makes my throat hurt for home for a moment.

I called back and reached my dad first, who tried to start a conversation. "How are you doing?" "Fine. I love my French class." "That's good." ::silence:: "Well, I'll get Mom."

And it's always been that way. I would occasionally brief him on how my grades were (note the operative word, brief), sometimes let him know if something was wrong with my car. Our longest conversations concerned things like finances, i.e. how much I owed him for car insurance, etc.

How can we have gone nineteen years with nothing to say to each other and I just now noticed it?

Mom and I are like friends. Not like we gab for hours or anything (she is my mother) but when I have a serious moral dilemma or want to gripe about teachers or occasionally even give boy-highlights, she's the one I go to. All summer I would come home in the evenings and beeline for her room, where she would be reading, and tell her about my day at work. My father is even between jobs right now (by choice) and therefore home all the time, yet he and I barely speak. It's beyond the male-female barrier. We just have nothing to say to each other.

It's kind of disheartening. He and my little brother could talk for hours about football. My little brother and I could talk for hours about everything (I give him advice on girls, hee hee... hence why he's never mean to the chubby ones, 'cause I promised to hunt him down and thonk him if I found out he was), my mom and I chatter like magpies on a long drive with just us and Sarah McLachlan in the car.

But Dad and me? Nothing. I just somehow know that if I started talking about my day to him he would tune me out, go back to his paper, watch TV, or flat out tell me he didn't have time for that right then. Not to be rude; his life and mine simply don't intertwine anymore. And it depresses me in a way I can't quite describe. It didn't even become noticeable until this summer after Mom and brother went back to school, with the two of us often alone in the house, and yet nothing to say.

I spent the drive back wondering about it, wondering if from now on there would always be that conversational rift between my father and me, that level of comfort we'll never reach because we wasted so many years talking about car payments.

I spent part of that drive with tears standing unfallen in my eyes, meshing the clouds into soup, just like last year, only this time for a different reason. Last time I wept for losing something very dear to me. This time I wept for realizing you can't lose what you never had.

But it was a good day, don't get me wrong. I had good classes, enjoyed my friends, but a call home and an encounter with being locked out of my room and hearing my roommate having "quality time" with her boyfriend through the door kinda skewed things. I'll be better in an hour, as long as I keep listening to this Lifehouse CD (and don't forget my keys ever again).

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