Santi (he/him)

I dunno how to start this rant, but consider yourself warned about, this following text may be messy and long.

So, last weekend I was watching the fan animated version of Epic: the musical (as one SHOULD do, it's amazing) with three of my friends. It was the first time watching the animations for two of my friends and I and we were enjoying enormously. We were reaching the lasts two songs (spoiler warning for the Odyssey, a two thousand year old poem), when Odysseus reunites with his son and then his wife. My friends were nearly sobbing and I wasn't feeling it as much as them. When the tears stopped we talked about how, for one of them, they really felt the moment when Odysseus opens up to Telemachus and they're so happy to see one another. They told me about how their father was a piece of shit, as a father and as a person, so they longed for the feeling Odysseus shows for his son.

And this got me thinking (no, I didn't hurt myself in the process). Because (just so you know, internet strangers) my father was also absent most of my life and when I turned 18 he basically told me he didn't want to see me. But what I felt in that scene wasn't lie "Gee, I would looove if my father was like Odysseus" because I know my father would never do any amount of effort to see me. So then I looked at the other side of the coin. "What would I feel if I were Odysseus and I came back 20 years later to see my son?". And that's when it hit me.

I personally want to have kids in the future so when I inverted the roles and saw myself as Odysseus I started to feel more. Apart from the fact that Telemachus is a boy and I want a girl to be my daughter, but that's minutia. Now, with this renewed way of thinking I felt this song way more. Not as the child wanting for my father to come back but as the father who went to Hades and back (see what I did there, kinda genius ngl) to see my son/daughter.