I have never seen Star Wars, and I do not plan on watching it any time soon. When I was three, I experienced something that no three year old should ever have to experience. My mom was at work, my brother was at school, my grandma was watching me. My dad left me. I had no clue what was going on at the time, all I knew was that my dad was abandoning us, and I didn’t know why. He called me his “monkey princess.” If I really was, how could he leave me like that?

It was sometime in September. What I remember most about that day is that we were standing outside of our apartment complex. I was with my grandma and my dad’s father was helping him load his bags into the trunk of their old Buick. My dad’s mother never bothered stepping out of the car; she stayed in the front seat, silent, the entire time. No one else was outside. It was just the four of us, and my “grandma” in the car. My dad left us that day to go live with his parents in Wyoming and we’ve never seen him since. My brother never even got to see him before he left; he never got to say goodbye.

My dad wasn’t all bad, as far as I knew, for a few years after he left. He called us a couple times a month until I was nine, and he sent us birthday and Christmas presents up until I was six. When I was nine, he and my brother had a falling out and he stopped calling us. But later that year, I discovered that he really is a deplorable man.

Approximately 123 miles. Two hours. One week. 140 minutes. That’s what it took for me to finally realize that I was not a priority, nor will I ever be. When I was nine, I discovered that I was worth less than Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. My mom offered to pay for my dad to visit his four children, whom he had not seen in four years, but he decided not to. He took the time off of work anyway.

My dad, who is supposed to always be there for me, the man who is supposed to raise me, the man who I am supposed to look up to; decided that I was not worth a three hour flight, that I was not worth missing a movie he could see, at any theater, anywhere in the country. So what did he do with that week off of work? He traveled from Greybull, Wyoming to Billings, Montana. To see Star Wars. He couldn’t be bothered to visit the children he abandoned three years prior, because he wanted to see a movie. One little movie.

I had grown a profound hatred for my dad because he showed me that I had less worth than a 140 minute movie. When I was thirteen, I made a facebook account. On the thirty first of December, 2012, he sent me a friend request and a message. I responded with, “I was told not to talk to strangers.” He was very unhappy with that, so of course he decided to start arguing with me. What else would you do after not talking to your child for four years? I told him not to talk to me because he was a “stupid drunk,” to which he insisted that I couldn’t possibly know. I may have been three when he left, but I do have memories of him. Every single one of them was bad. He told me that the memories I had were actually my mom’s memories. However, I think when everyone who ever met him here, in Michigan, thought he was was a piece of s***, it has to be true.

He punched a hole in my bathroom door. He only ever played video games. When we were in the way of the television screen, he would scream at us. He never paid any attention to us otherwise. When I was two, he was supposed to be watching me while my mom was at work, but he was instead playing video games and he let me get ahold of a bar of laxative chocolate. I managed to eat the entire thing, and I had to be taken to the hospital to get my stomach pumped. I hate him with a burning passion. At one point during our argument, I told him that I wished that he had succeeded in killing himself because then I would at least have some sort of justification for why he stopped talking to me. The last thing my dad ever said to me was “K.” at 12:15 A.M. on January first, 2013. All I’m worth to him is a single letter.

Twelve years ago, my dad left my family. It hurt. A lot. If I wasn’t good enough for the man who is supposed to support me in everything and love me unconditionally, who’s to say that I’ll be good enough for anyone? You may consider Star Wars to be one of the greatest cinematographic works of all time, but to me, it is just another reminder of inadequacy and abandonment.