Topic: Tell about a person who has made an influence on your life and describe that influence.

My questions:
-As a reader, what would you like to hear more about in order to further address the topic. I'm aware that I haven't really developed into the "influence" part, merely touched on all the background story.
-Do you think a "daddy issues" topic is too cliche for an app. essay? Or do I take it in a direction that can combat that?
-What do you think of my writing style? Do I have voice? What would you say the tone of the essay is? I'm trying to go for introspective, rational and mature.

The essay:

More than anyone's presence in my life, my father's absence has been the most significant influence on my character. My parents divorced when I was eight, my brother Colin, six. Their divorce was not a particularly messy nor tragic one, and I will not pretend that my brother and I fell victim to anything worse than the trials of most other broken homes. My mother told me in the grocery store that their marriage had fallen apart and that they were separating. I went to karate class that morning in tears; that was the only time I let anyone see me cry about it. Marriages end, and though I wasn't happy about it, I understood that.

For the first two years following my parents' divorce, my father took full advantage of the lesser custody he was granted. Colin and I had dinner with him once a week, and spent one weekend per month at his house on the other side of town, as well as certain holidays. But as the years went by, my father's presence in my and my brother's life slowly waned.

It has been over two and a half years since I last saw my father. The only proof of his existence I have now are the impersonal e-greeting cards he sends me on my birthdays ("Happy birthday, I love and miss you. xoxo Daddy") and the instances when my mother releases in my direction her frustration with his late child support payments. He simply has not made any sort of effort to be a part of my or Colin's life: no phone calls, no visits, no gifts. He lives in Asia now, with his wife and new baby boy. I do not know where in the continent of Asia they reside; I was not told he had remarried until a year after the ceremony; I was not aware they'd had another child until the boy was six months old.

My boyfriend recently asked me if I love and miss my father. I know that I do not. I have happy memories of him, and there was certainly a time when he was my hero and the man of my dreams. But I was a different person when I loved my father. I was a child who spent weekends at his house watching Blade Runner and Planet of the Apes, eating frozen pizza and having tickle fights. He was my Daddy, and he was perfect in the eyes of his daughter. But in the two and a half years since I last briefly saw my father, I've grown. I cannot carry a love that has not been reinforced into a new stage of my life, and I cannot miss someone whom I never see to begin with.

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Punk rock died when the first kid said, "Punk's not dead."

Then again, I may have simply been expecting something more after that vividly-written short story you once posted in here.

And yeah, you've yet to mention the influence itself.

What are the other topics to choose from?