It's a rare day when a man cries, let alone your own father.

All my strength rested in a man seemingly invincible to this cruel world, a man who is defined by his broad shoulders and his womanizing tactics. He is cool, calm, collected with a quiet voice, yet he sits across from me in a white plastic chair, his face unrecognizable with anguish.

We are seated in a seaside cafe, dripping wet and sand spewn, attempting to enjoy what can best be described as a sad sad corndog. Our vacation thus far has been riddled with perplexed emotions, mostly due to my annoyance with our company: my younger cousin, my half sister and I trapped in the back seats of a blue van that usually serves the purpose of hauling animal feed for my father's family business. This week long getaway is seemingly different from what I had remembered. Instead of rolling waves of the great black sea, our current location choice was met with an endless array of jellyfish. Harmless, but enough to make me squeamish with each unidentifiable bump under the water. Despite the beauty of the Crimean peninsula and the attempt at a family road trip, my spirits are not satisfied, and my heart sits heavy with the unmet expectations of the magical times spent here when I was a child.

And here we sit, an awkward family reunion of sorts, an unlikely trio in an overly white, barren cafe. We're arranged in a triangle, with my father across and my sister adjacent, staring at the lonely corndogs and slurping our juice boxes through pathetic bendy straws.

And he cries. And it's unfair. It's unfair to put me in a position where I am supposed to feel sorry. To feel sorry for a man that had forgotten my existence when it was to his advantage, and had left me sitting broken at the ledge of my window when he had not showed up on a promised day. What gives him the right to scar me further with his false tears and words of missed opportunities, when I know he doesn't care in the slightest?

But that's the kind of man he is, and my childhood has seen it all. But I can't help but feel ashamed of myself for thinking that all these years later, he was different. That a road trip was the cure all for this diseased relationship. I thought I had come to terms, had come to acceptance with his face reflecting like a smoke and mirror show. His one way mirror had fooled me again as I fell for his tears. I am no wiser. He had played me again, and I was a foolish girl with too much empathy to give in a seaside barren Crimean cafe.