Early that Saturday morning
the air was cool.
It brushed a sky the color of peaches.
The neck of my black woolen sweater constricted,
binding me.
My father’s pallid face,
still creased with pillow marks,
stared from across the worn wood of the kitchen table.
One of his legs twitched nervously;
its swish penetrated the silence.

I suddenly realized how much he knew,
how little he understood.
What had gone on last night
was beyond his steely gaze.
He frowned.
I smiled in my mind.

His stare grew heavy under my prim smirk.
My blue eyes glistened with the slivers of morning sunlight
Splashed across the table.
He didn’t understand
How my heart had soared in the balmy August night.
How it ran with me
Out of the house in the early hours of morning.

He rambled on
And on about his childhood –
It was nothing like my wild one.
There is nothing at all in common between us:
no strings to tie me down to his restrictions.
This realization strikes me
as I drift farther away from his lecture
and deeper into my daydream.