I am your daughter.
Your child.
Your only offspring.
I have spent my entire life — every minute of every day for nearly twenty years — trying to win your love.
When I realized that was an impossibility, I downshifted my expectations. I thought, perhaps, if I worked hard enough, if I achieved academic success, if I won every contest, if I never stepped a toe out of line… I might one day win your affection. Your approval. At the very least, your grudging pride in all I have accomplished.
I see now, the flaw in my plan; the grave miscalculation under which I have been operating.
There is no use trying to win the hearts of people who do not possess them.
You cannot love me — you do not have the capacity for it. You look at me and see another corporate asset, an inanimate acquisition you can play to your advantage in the business world.
I forgive you for that.
After all, you cannot change who you are.
But neither can I.
I will no longer attempt to mold myself into a shape you find acceptable. I will no longer chase after anything you have to offer. I will no longer be made to feel like a disappointment.
The truth is?
You two are the disappointment.
You have let me down, not the other way around. You have failed, at every turn, to live up to any expectations I possessed for what a mother and father should be. For how they should raise a child. For how they should build a family.
From this moment on, I am not your daughter.
Not your child.
Not your offspring.
From this moment on…
We are not family.
But then… we never really were.
Were we?
I wish you success in your future endeavors at VALENT.
We all know, that’s what you truly care about, anyway.
Best,
Josephine
I stamp it with international postage pilfered from my father’s office, address it, drive it straight to the post-office, and drop it in the slot before I have a chance to change my mind.
It is the only farewell my parents will ever receive from me. The only goodbye they will ever hear — not from my lips, but from the tip of my pen.
A letter feels like a fitting end. After all, it was a letter that started this. A letter that broke us. I can only hope, when they receive it, they feel half as much pain as I did when I read the one they forced Archer to write me last summer.
More likely, they’ll simply file it away in a folder of other corporate grievances, to be dealt with by an underling at a later date — assuming they even bother to read it at all. There’s a high probability they’ll toss it straight into the bin without digesting a single word or sentiment. But that doesn’t matter.