Published by: Keshia Gwyneth Esposa
Date Published: July 17, 2026
Time Published: 4:15 PM
Category: Prose
Theme: To be so similar to the same man that you've been desperately trying to avoid becoming
Do not look at me the same way you would look at my father. Do not tell me that I act like him or look like him. Do not compliment the uncanniness of our similarities.
I am nothing like my father.
I may get angry like him, but I do not shout with his voice. We may have the same eyes, but mine are not filled with anger and contempt. I do not carry the same cruelty in my chest and I most certainly do not leave wounds in places where love was supposed to live.
So please, do not look at me like I'm his daughter.
Don't search for him in the way I stand, the way I speak, the way I carry myself. Do not point at the pieces of me that resembles him as if they are something worth admiring because every resemblance feels like a stain I cannot wash away.
I spent years learning how to become my own person. Years pulling apart every habit, every mannerism, and every inherited piece of myself just to make sure I was not turning into him.
Yet somehow, he remains. Why is that?
When I hear my voice, I hear his tone hiding beneath my own. When I look at my hands, I see the roughness he left behind. Sometimes I catch my reflection in passing and for a split second, I understand why people hesitate when they look at me. I see it in the way their expressions change. I sense it in the way they avoid my gaze. I hear it in the silence that follows after they realize whose daughter I am. And no matter how hard I try, I cannot blame them.
It is truly cruel that we share the same name. Cruel that his mistakes arrive before I do, that I am introduced as his daughter before I am ever introduced as myself. I have spent my whole life trying to prove that I am not him, only to discover that blood is a language everyone speaks fluently. And perhaps the cruelest thing of all is that I carry pieces of him without my permission. Things I never asked for, yet things I cannot return.
How very cruel it is that when you rip apart the bones of my chest, searching for proof of who I am, you will find his heart resting instead of mine. And no matter how desperately I try to gouge it out, people will always recognize it before they ever notice that I have one of my own.
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