I know it kills you a bit every day to have never known your real father, but you're better off. It was just a tiresome spinning prison's front door, and not just one, but thirteen years spread between every big-house in the state of California. Which, by the way, is a glorious place to live. If you are living. The same stale lies, and broken promises behind three inches of hazy bullet proof glass, and filthy booths. Two way phones reeking and coated with the breath of desperate girlfriends, and bored screaming children in drooping diapers. My initials carved in every booth's table top. Kind of like taking your desk from sixth grade with you to high school, college, work, retirement. And having to explain to everyone at each place, why Billy loves Jeniffer is etched upon its surface. Exactly, Nine inch nails. When I got older and wiser, and grandma Sharon would say let's go see your dad. I would huff and puff my protests all the way there and back, as if I were posessed and on my way to a dark age's exorcism. "I'm sick of going there every week for Christ's sake. Why can't he grow up and just decide not to go back in every fucking two years, and save everyone the ironic trip there and back?" But she would only reply with that look of a mother devoted to a sick helpless child, and I was the bringer of bad news declaring that we give up hope. If she only knew that hope Can't change the hopeless who fear change more then freedom any day, any month. Any year, any way... She might have finally slept for one night without a self smoking cigarette perched and hanging audienceless from her limp yellowing hand Upon that couch in front of that 1985 Mitsubishi big screen tv with its persistent droning 'three in the morning station identification' accompanied by the inevitable national anthem complete with a flag waving to no one. Except a room full of smoke and the tick of an antique clock from the shadows of an unlit corner. Ten years later. On her death bed. She kept calling me by our father's name while deep in the grip of a morphine delusion. Riddled by lung and brain cancer, and years of waiting by the phone, and shooting the shit at the mailbox With John, the postman. (At least he made her laugh) I answered her back the way I thought he might have, had he given a shit, but since he was incarcerated, again, and it had been so many years since I had seen him, or my initials. I forgot how he sounded So I just winged it. Kind of like how he winged being a dad. Her need and unconditional love to see him was much stronger then my acting skills. But unfortunately it was not strong enough to keep her alive. A few years back I heard that you were living in Henderson. I also heard you were having some problems with drugs. I, too, am an addict. For fourteen years I have stuffed that void with whatever was on hand. Your younger brother Mathias is also very deep in denial about drugs and life. Our father buys them from him. (He has been out four five years) We don't speak. The past has saturated everything to the point of no return. If for some reason I don't make it to tomorrow I want you to know that I love you, and I can say that killing yourself for that piece of shit would be nothing but a waste of time. trust me, because Joshua, that's something I know for sure even from the depths of this endless abyss of broken promises and the yesterday children. Self destruction only proves that you care less then he does. Tonight, I will pray for you. Since I am to far from myself to pray for tomorrow, or me. I am writing you this letter because I am very sick Joshua. I can't even get out of bed in the morning without getting high. My heart is broken. I am running on fumes and desperate momentum. My will to live has been swallowed by my need to never let go of something I never even had. If I was the big brother they never let you have? I would say live to let go, before letting go turns holding on for dear life.