Opening pages

THE GAP

A Story in Memories and One Letter Never Sent

Adam did not know what he was waiting for.

He only knew the waiting had a face.

A Note

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In 1919, Franz Kafka wrote a letter to his father. It was forty-seven pages long. His mother refused to deliver it. His father never read it. Kafka kept it, which means he kept the wound in document form — organized, dated, present on his desk.

This book is not that letter. But it grew from the same place that letter grew from: the specific, daily, grinding experience of a son who tried and tried and tried to be seen by a man who had decided, somewhere long before the trying began, not to look.

The boy in this story is called Adam. His father has no name in these pages. This is deliberate. The father is not a character. He is a condition.

The gap in the title is not a metaphor. It is the actual distance between two chairs at a dinner table, two people in the same room, a son's hand extended and a father's hand that never moved to meet it. It is measured not in kilometers but in the small, specific, daily moments of withholding that accumulate, over years, into something that functions exactly like a wall — except that a wall, at least, does not pretend to be an open door.

Some of what follows is memory. Some is the letter Adam never sent. The boundary between the two is not always clear. This is also deliberate.

— The Author