After my dad died, we found the love letters

Summary

after my dad died, we found the love letters 23 Nov, 2025 a few days after dad died, we found the love letters, hidden away among his things. one of them said, i love dota and i love peaches, but i love you more. i will quit smoking and lose weight for you. the happiest days of my life are the ones that start with you across the breakfast table from me. my parents were not a love match. at 27 and 26, they were embarrassingly old by the standards of their small chinese port town. all four of my grandparents exerted enormous pressure to force them together. my father fulfilled the familial obligations heaped on his shoulders without complaint. he didn't get along with my mother, or my younger brother, but this wasn't too bad; he often worked away from us (for months and even years on end), mostly in china, more recently in redacted, another canadian city. the physical distance between us for most of my life has made his passing easier for me to come to terms with. i call him dad here but i didn't lose a dad, i lost someone who was abstractly a father to me. he was more often gone than there, had missed all of my graduations and birthday parties. there was one time he took care of me when i was sick. his hands on me were gentle, and he told me stories from chinese history while i lay feverish in bed. i was seven. this is approximately the only memory i have of him being a dad to me. still, the two of us were close in our own way. sometimes, the two of us would go on long walks together. after fifteen minutes of silence, or twenty, something would loosen in him and he would start to tell me about the depths of his sadness and the disappointment in the way his life played out. i was good at not taking this personally. i didn't think he ever had a chance to be happy or authentic, his entire life. he sacrificed himself so i could. i always thought that if he had a chance at happiness, he would be the gentle, funny, and sensitive aesthete that i caught glimpses of sometimes...