On your next year.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written a letter like this to you. Usually, fortunately, we’re just able to talk.

A little over a month ago, when we were at the tournament in Tampa, I had the most traumatic nightmare that I can ever remember having. The setting was mundane and naturalistic, a set of streets and buildings and overcast weather. I had no idea where you were, and as that realization dawned upon me I began searching for you with increasing desperation.

And then I found you. Cold, and lifeless, in a dumpster. The simple act of writing these words now makes my heart seize and shatter, even knowing as I do that when I woke up you were safe and snuggled in the hotel bed next to me. I didn’t get back to sleep that morning and I’ve never told you the horror that my subconscious inflicted upon me.

Today, for the very first time, you are a teenager. You walk further afield into the wilderness of your own identity, planting flags in the soil and carving initials in the trees as you determine the shape of yourself. You have kept the soccer, you have kept the video gaming, you have changed the hair, you have developed a deep appreciation for modern rap and hip-hop, you swing back to chess every now and again. You have an energy that ricochets off of every surface in your vicinity and a voice that carries across canyons. You have internalized the importance of cooperation and camaraderie, and while you are often a prankster, a bear-poker, a rascally rabbit, there is also a sparkling silver river of charm and kindness running through your center that draws people easily to your orbit.

You are so many things at your age that I never was at your age and there are moments that I wonder if I actually know how to parent you. There are moments that I am in such awe of the being you are becoming on your own momentum that I might forget how much more I can still provide you.

There is a shadow over my shoulder as I watch you step into this next stage of your life. The years directly ahead are going to offer you opportunities for both triumph and disaster, and the time you are given to choose from options A, B, and C may be months or it may be minutes. I am acutely aware that these next four years in particular are going to be fraught with questions about what it means to be you on not only an individual level but on a societal level. You are coming of age in a dark era, when corruption is considered a virtue, mercy a heresy, and hatred the anthem that cycles repeatedly through the public address systems.

The people that thrive in this desolate, toxic mess will tempt you. They will tell you that the key to your happiness is to join their temperament; they will tell you that the path to success is to dress yourself in their cruelty and devote your effort to your own vainglorious power. They are in the process as I write this of remaking the engines of governance to serve their own twisted visages and I cannot promise you that we will remain safe from their venomous tendrils. I cannot give you assurances that being a more empathetic, more considerate, more generous, and more curious individual amidst the oncoming chaos will prove any sort of advantage.

But.

I will continue to try and steer you in that direction anyhow. Because I have to believe, if nothing else, that one more person like you growing into adulthood with the best parts of himself still intact is one more person who might help lead us out of the void into which some of your fellow citizens have elected to submerge us for the time being.

I have to believe that if you turn out to be who I know you can be then whatever part I played in it was time well spent. And the person I know you can be is worth fighting for.

Love, and courage, and happiest of birthdays.

Dad.