Something

There is something about stubble, as there is about roads home, as there is about deciding the decades in hurried handwriting, in bundles of strained certainty and ascertained strength. There is something about this opaque, imperfect place where I bet and breach but still belong. About an unhurried haven, a patch of evergreen in this striking city of sound, awash in winter lights.

Words

Mine begins under a bridge. It cries of cliché, that the blanket burden begins somewhere between a beginning and an edge rather than an end; at the rotted wooden breaching of a life I had not only chosen, but had curled around and grown as my own. The darkness was the same, or somehow hatched from a speckled, imperfect love; a lust sprung from my bright insides, my need for breaking dawn. Blue is the color that lights my memory of those moments, those moments inside of the most violent earthly velveteen. It is blue not in nostalgia or in mourning or in the full, frothy glass of melancholy served. Instead, what I see is blue as monsoon, blue as a better, if opened, sky.


The following is what lies inside of my father’s first folder. I knew he was a fisherman. But so too was he a poet, a writer I never knew.

I am an old man.
Fierce weather in the thoroughfare
Breaks the panes
And takes me to seaside
Where I wait, the last blast to lift me
Between the Widow’s Island and the Hen’s
That I be reborn as seals reborn, and porpoises,
Feeding on the debris at slack tide.

Many are the drownings, winters
Of fine, strong men
Swept to cold shoals and reefs.
Bones are found in tide pools at ebb.
Many the crystal forests, often ice storms
Make boats wallow in the heavy seas.
Mans flesh burned white by ice.

Be they so bold
There are many with one ear
Fingers taken by the sea
For smelt and sardines.

Paper cups

Christmas in this city is not crystalline but softer, simpler, struck inside of those memories we mightily pin down--we devour with traces of time. My memory is most fated to, fixated on our vibrant past of paper cups and paper dreams to match.

Outside the snow has melted, the sun streaming through the streets with silent joy, a jubilation of having outsmarted even the seasons. It is the same love that struck a chord on the wooden bridge bending beneath my lungs; it is the same love that snuck behind my windowed walls, my own walls, balled up in breaths I was fated to expire. It is the same love that blew my heart away outside of a DC bookstore, filled with metallic paper, that barely caught my eye. It is the same love that, liquorish flavored and frighteningly liquored, melted beside the Brandenburger Tor. It is the same love that struck our wicker chairs, wept into the northern lake shores, drunk high and mighty on the rapid heat that summer brought. All love is the same, in that it both alights and licks your wounds--in romance, familial frenzies: most of all in the walks where tingling fingers meet, failed promise not yet fully deflated, begging to be brought back to life in the louder, limited circumstance where love is lasting--where it may lend a hand.

Paper cups fill my mind, those empty and aching inside of wired bins; those too spirited to hold in hands; those paper cups you curled around, so slight and sweetened on your tongue.

New York

When I arrive home, I am touched by the fullest of nostalgia, vibrant past wings that beat against me and bring back a single expectant moment, at rest on the tip of my tongue, my heart. A single, uniting meal; a conversation underground; the promise of full green peas and a roast tied in speckled, string bows.

When I arrive home, I beg the roads to clear, although Sunday evenings are certainly congested, the city's cough crept around the highway, inevitable choice between a tunnel and a bridge.

I laugh out my love for this city, as animate and inhuman as it remains. Still I am somehow more alive in the pale green streets, where both my past and present are steeped, a changeling hood I can at least call home. It is not only the ghosts that are sweeter, stuck to my insides in true, traceable forms, as the pomegranate yogurt I revel on the roof of my mouth. It is the memory, never struck by the lightning I dared upon its frames, still so startling now that I have to close my eyes. It is the familiar taste of morning, the places of my walls that remain reminiscent of him. It is the red dressing of my room, a million books where I could always hide my head. It is the drawn out drawl of the Brooklyn Bridge, the children I have helped to grow.

I love this city as I should only love people, family, companions. I love this city for the vibrant beat it installs in me, the faster dreams, drugged up on too much noise and little nicety. And no matter where I am now, where I end, it is this beginning that reminds me: the first embraces on park benches, Christmas coffees, balancing of porcelain and a turquoise sea of awnings, headlights, listless, wistful, indulgent desire.

Sails

I am awaiting an end to the fluster, to the soft waves of uncertainty I constantly, consistently push out of my eyes. Still, I favor the past, with all of its giant, thundering flavor. Still, I prefer the phantom of what I have lost, with an icy assuredness, with the violet fawns of boxed rooms. With the chocolate breaths that burned each night alive.

I am lost there, even, on the familiar streets, where promise of pretention waits, where I can close my eyes and turn my frame to whatever wind it was that brought me, bought my beginning. Why I don't fight for anything. I can't fight for anyone, when my weapons lie preoccupied in other times, golden, grasped by frozen fingers, bent around the hills that hid their heads in portable, potable skies.

I drink to that, to them, to him. I drink in the skies, bled in circles forward that leave me dizzy and dazzled by loss. I should feel guilty for going back, if only in my thoughts, but instead am guilty in this forward march, in body or in mind. Is it possible to belong to a certain time of life, an experience evidenced by burning flags of love? Is is possible to only find yourself in other places, not those you have chosen, but those discarded, discredited for the flimsiest of flaws?

Suddenly, it seems, in moving this direction, whether forward or upward or back again--it seems I am waiting for a frantic fluttering of wings, a gentle, generous sign. I am waiting to take back the only words I have spoken and known to their insides, seen in their brittle bones.

Signs, like the skies, like the wind, are uncertain, if ever evident, but so are needed to tear out fears--to push back at the skeletons that embrace so suddenly, cradled in our insides and curved against our irretreatable sails.

Both sides now

What is love? And where do we find it, aside from in our blood, the breasts of kin. Is it understanding struggles, or gentle dreaming? Is it wanting even when violent, human hardships take us aback, take away that snow white stumbling characteristic only of first kisses and the rarest bonds we break? I am so arched around, so molded to my fat past of love, a gray past, perhaps, but one with doubt divided. I have tried, too, to locate love here, to wait for the foundations that shake and shudder to eventually calm. It is more exhausting, this waiting, this willing, than the very particular passion of love. All I know is that I want a similar syrup as my past, that burning bittersweet both sordid and severe, the swelling of my heart when the world, small and centered, felt full, purred back in a way that was mine alone.

Menagarie of Hands

It is in moving underground, looking above at the glass pyramid that was only built in my youthful visit to this city, that I can be transported to another time. No, it is not with the wings of the headless angel that moves me so, but with the swift step through vine-like exhibits, a world of art, of aching, a world so akin the Central Park palace of sculpture gardens and green roofs that grew me. So overflowing with spirits are the walls, that I am taken aback by a million photographers looking to remember themselves in so sacred of place. I am taken aback by their pristine postures beside fallen angels, the broken, battered faces of Divinci's wives.

It is an overwhelming space, so full with bent bodies, so styled by sharper times. It is a world of corpses, of lurid, limp, luscious limbs come undone. It is a world of serpeants embraced by their architects and the very faces of our gods. For me in this winding world of halls, no mirrors but others' eyes to look upon, there is a menagerie of hands. Even on the winged creatures that crawl under my skin, those hands hold tight to each other, all that is left at the end of each era. In piles, in grappling for a painted story, or for a woman left alone by time.

No wonder I am exhausted by the thought of sterility, of clean places that hold such troubled pasts. Before, it was always whales, that giant under which I saw stuffed, encased time, silken hides of sand stood next to those yellowed eyes, so like the wolves I had watched for from my windowpane. There the love I had anticipated, anguished, abandoned. There the felt of fountains that told untrue futures, fetted with some kind of peace.

And now it is the fingers I see that I want to bring back to life, to re-blush with breathe and murmured beating. To caress back into being, slide along my wrists, human strings of music, both silenced and now seen as mute. I can finally understand the longing to go back, , to unsettle the mourned, to link their fingers, their stories somehow into our own. To make men, as we do mistakes, at once ours and everlasting.

Russian Dolls

It is bad enough to breed promises to those we love, who fall to their knees in city bus stations, beg us not to follow fanciful, flighty paths. Those who love us more deeply than we anticipate, or can replicate, and realize only when this draws blood from our hearts.

Breaking promises to ourselves, however, cuts somewhat deeper. I see it in my own actions, in the steps that carry me east, that blow back in my face the most unforgivable fact of all: all that I want, that warms the smallest, truest part of me, lies parallel to my past. It is not a replication, but only slightly altered, by circumstance, by time, a new regression to what I find innate or learned. Am I re-learning the smallest of steps, to walk again in a manner much more true to myself, to allow in, perhaps, in whole and unforgiving ways? To stop wagering on possibilities, stop turning my back to not a blank but dirtied blanket of honesty? These moments still breathe fiercely inside of me, wake me in a manner akin to the ache in my arm, burrow themselves, icy--engendering a splintered, spent warmth. They seem to me insurmountable, to want to come back to me no matter how I try to put them out, to write them out, to reach out to other aspects of myself. I am still stuck on understanding how I have lied so fiercely to myself, how I have wounded, how I have waded so deeply in hipocrasy.

My excuse has been sorrow, has replaced other excuses with a force un natural to my times. It is sorrow, or the emotive, however, that I have past played upon, embraced with my bitten tongue and bred into my fingers so that I could write. It is my only inhuman love, or unliving love. It is the only art that brings tears to my eyes, that breaks open the parts of me I need most. And it is in this crashing of waves, waves of longing, lust, unearthing a past of pasts. It is where I find stregnth, an unstrategic path to soft redemption.

I can write about forgiving, even when I cannot forgive; can write about a past of pigeons and love, even when I cannot look upon the photographs that brought me there; I can write about my father, create my own manifestations of his ghost. But still I seek to trump such possibility, afraid perhaps of a Russian doll effect, a wound, inside a wound, inside a wound. Or a need to live through stories, not truths, to build my life upon the canine teeth of fairytales, from the outset smeared with beauty, but so fast to fade away.

Above Water

The nostrils of the past flare in this walled creation, softly serpentine in its escavation of waves. Could it be that here, a million steps and swings from that sweet, frothy past, I miss the milk of home. Thirst only for a dip in the whitest drafts of past. Find nothing more pristine than a portly southern drawl and other drapes used to incite these Pinnochio nostrils, if not the ripe picking of the prickliest memory.

I have not been let down by the waves but only by the sands, those finest strands of time. It is in the wake of beaten promises and, far worse, my father, that for a moment I can feel I have escaped fate; can throw back into its bowl-eyed face the farce that I cannot feel.

It is my very fear of feeling those sweeping, strangling wings that now make me face my wounds alone. It is in an almost perfect sword dance that I perform, laughing, then bowing suddenly in short avoidance of shedding blood. Yet the blunt irony of these iron battalions is the familiar in the farthest away mountains blushed with life, are the fisherman in evergreen hats, dangerously beautiful in their nordic nostalgia. Are the strings of sentimentally-salted pork. Are blue pools, if not eyes, that even of inhuman, hard built brawn prove that ice, that time, that hearts do melt.

Shattering should be prescribed to portraits; to vases; to the finality of the items we send into cement storms.

However, it seems, those items, or beings, those loves and adorations seem most precious to us at the end of it all. We struggle to put back together the most immaterial of shards, those shot dead by our wildest winterings, the velveteen strength of human hands. We pat and pet back at glass, at greed, at the gaps of these creatures whose tongues, whose teeth, whose torches we have suddenly expired.

Repercussion still bites back. And still we ignore its eyes, all golden and awake in the midnight that cites our exhaustion. Still we shun the yellow pupils that portray us as toddlers of rage.

On Dublin

I am unsure of these waves, shot gray by a thundering sky, struck gray by both the gulf and the gods. I am now always unsure of the sea, its true face momentarily lost of phantom, no skeletal beings ready to eschew the racket that all bones grow; this flicker of memory and might imprinted only for the decades on our land.

The beauty here, as I was destined to learn from my dear friend, is the sea. It is the short, shining houses and a familiar horizon that is not mine, but I see in his words, nostalgia, nick of a grin—is a fawn reflection of love for home. How often such love is forgotten—as if all love should be bent upon men and creatures; as if the love for our place, our space, our scents and tastes is somehow less real, is unexpected, is closer to the surface of hearts. Here is both a bright and a gray gift of home, the tasty brown fury only compliment to warmth of laughter; a laughter for which I fall fully and quickly; a laughter that licks my wounds.

This Irish city is almost oppositional to my own home, which is why I am unsure of the familiarity that ebbs inside. The buildings are short and undaunting; they do not challenge each other and thus can coexist freely and fully, not symmetrically but seemingly right. The home where I stay is a full house by the sea, unlike my apartment by the raw river of Manhattan. And yet time feels as velveteen as in my Westside. I wonder if it is the family, the strong, devoted mother; the wonderfully humoured father; the children grown and so clearly, fully loved. I wonder if the bond between my friend and I arises from this—knowing the warmth, the strength, the impossible beauty of familes and homes. As we have found a piece of that home not in the body of our old shared house, but in the space within and between us; an unidentifiable if sixth sense that marks kin by far more than blood.

When in Crete

It is the end of the summer and somehow I am constantly struck awake by an embrace of yours. It was also a wet, hazy morning and I was standing by our kitchen table with my arms linked around myself; then, still, I was stuck in my postponed adolescence, heady, hormonal rage that no one could climb inside of—and from which no one could let me out. Like a child that morning, like the child of yours that I always was, you drew me into your arms, uncurled my own long limbs from around my latched waist, my human armor pointless and pitiful against love.

There is nothing I want more now. It is all that I ask for, knowing the hollow at the end of this wish.

I spend days wondering where things would stand if you were not gone. A mixture of yearning and need draws me to this point, in which I wonder whether your pride would lie in my ability to climb out of that hole. If you would be reveling in the peace that followed, that was broken only by your absence, but so broken bitterly, wounds that cannot—cannot begin to—heal. If we would be south, fishing, waking at dawn, both happily asleep by sunset, wholly unaffected by the call of night.

I cannot talk to you aloud. Despite suggestions. Despite the newfound and particularly ironic desire I share with my sister for ghosts; despite my knowledge that you still somehow, somewhere exist; despite the times I catch a glance of myself in the mirror and your eyes look back, or our forehead, or our nose. But in writing I can somehow say the things that stick at the tip of my tongue; that are nonsensical and yet the root of the wrenching that still wakes me, that leaves me always cold.

What I wish the most, is that I had skipped my dawdling into adulthood and never stepped back from the fierceness of your love. That I had gone with you that last time to eat impossibly expensive burgers and sip fountains of iced tea. That I would climb beside you in a car this afternoon, we would drive down Midwest roads and only then in response to sleepless nights, would I shift into slumber—a daughter needing the hum of movement, needing the sliding streets, needing you close. That we were now in Crete, as promised, blurred by both the beauty and the lifelines of books you had eaten with your eyes.

Take

Mistake hearkens amelioration, as if life's curtain can be drawn again. Mistake invites nostalgia and drags me back, in the warmth of this sunset night, in the reflection of those kitten heels and a girl's perfume at my neck.

It is funny that it is her and her laughter, here in a city that was not that of our friendship, that brings it back. A ghost that is ours and ours alone--save our Hungarian friend with her beautiful music and mountainous laugh. It is funny that I miss in a way succumbed to by my small fairy friend at once and without warning. And it is harder to realize that hate gives way to this wash of longing, of lilting towards a line already lived aloud. That is rife in remembering the bitter shocks of red; the maple syrup drawn to, within; the most beautiful of rage.

What touches is that familiar scent and sound; these Siamese twins still tender renderings of the wooden seats curved to our opposite of frames; those waffles so fat with life that they bit back; that fire of beginning; that fire of the carpets, of the woods.

Perhaps it is because I could look above and beyond a neighborhood I have outloved. And with that so many memories that bite back, which laid down in the shadow of such tragedy, only now, in this flowery air of my friend, begin to set themselves free. They are released, in me, in these breaths, these words from which I cannot step aside; they are unearthed with such honor and honesty that even in my exhaustion I cannot sleep. Even in this attempt I cannot put this into words. The relief lies somewhere much deeper than resting or writing or realizing. Although I know an attempt at relief is as futile as my movement towards the cardboard past.

Equal Love

There is no doubt that the undersoftness of the skin is a shudder, the jaunt shoulderblades of something more. Molded to the drought of our time, the set-sailing fall beneath what waves we have know most intimately, ridden high in the sky with a might impervious to the love we should have swallowed whole.

No sorrow stands in the way today, or clouds the fiery pink of dawn's skies: rather we are marked by a racket unreachable by roar or rain, a calling back to a wish we cast upon a stone, serenaded amongst pyramids boxed inside our singing city; histories we have stolen and made ours.

Who will joust with our minarets of youth? How to recall what we have lost not with countless steps, but with countering that which is left to memory, slippery if miniature in mourning, too sweet to swallow whole. As love.

As life, as the ridiculed Moby Dick with filthy, fiery eyes, arched in the earth's bowels, fraught with too much to feed upon and far too much suffering to tuck away inside.

If this is loss, we suppose, there is no room to lose more; our apartment is full of recollection, dreary, rage-inducing rubble. Grief here gapes open-mouthed and, as toddlers, everything we touch is new. This newness is itself different; it knows no novelty, but rather the proof of dirtied hands and dirtier hearts. A desperation for re-entertaining the pristine, still being rigorous with so much gone. With the wind, the fire, with the water that always washes back; either sparks or soothes our wounds.

It is an ebb and flow, this and us and our broken hearts. It is no softening, no escaping, but rather reveling in the rare moments too full with life to ignore or kick back with long legs or fall asleep to in the jumbled exhaustion that embraces and releases, patternless and not one bit paternal in its warmth.

Sometimes, these days, we even throw back our heads and belly laugh; or kiss fiercely the young child that raises his eyebrows in reference to you. Sometimes, all is burnt with breath, inside, in starts, in the same wild wind that could not bring you back.

Perhaps it is because I was not there beside you that my mind is full with only fishes and frantic hideaways. Perhaps I am happier to know you now--or it is somehow right to remember you--curled to the side of a broken rowboat, shifting above bored crocodiles, drawing in the morning sun and suckers with a single line. We lie on that line too, today, are drawn to you and the puddles you pretended were eyes; relive your youth in photographs and love letters that we, kittens of your small litter, lick livdly and desperately, a lifeline to devour and then demand again.

You remain only in our clutter; in our cluttered heads; in the world of your photographic prose.

And I find, that I have misnamed this as empathy. As it is not empathy but instead that endemic to being part of you. That somehow, no matter what struggles made against this tide, no matter the fraying of this line, you are near. The patches of your yellow plaid tidy in my pockets. Imagined lockets I would hold above my left breast.

Still, there is nothing serene. I cannot balance this or bargain with anybody's god. In the gardens at my sister's, pulling back the earth at daybreak, in the wild waters north, you are brought to me too far too touch or turn to, between myself and some enemy of resting place. Time only breeds as it does with all species and all specimens that do not fall, it only breeds the need in the greenery you built, in the family you fought for and in the children you loved out loud and grew, somehow, strong enough.

Overturned

It is best to face the lull of betrayals with open eyes or with the silence that sneers at years of revelry. I can laugh, or land head first in familiar muffin tops, the green grass of lakes or pickled pistachios, gorging on the presence of the past. But the neighborhood is empty now, echoes in a night where I am told by tired neighbors of their child-dogs, recommended the reading of pharmaceutical failures and the most potent pillaging of all, not our, times. Fruit stands now stoic undercover, once broken to the ground and built upon by giant, jealous cranes.

I still see the penguin suits where we sweated out first nights at home. These paper planes flied high, a thousand storks that could not save our name. It is in these motions that I might have been, a few years back, making light or making love, shadowed in the moonless night that heaved, breathy and barren; the night that, starless, or at least so patient as to swell around its drums, allowed a manicured melancholy: a stage not set but sorted in its sins.

It reminds me of dancing or dwelling, idling on sides streets, sticky stoops where secrets were undressed, decorum come undone, desire dappled in by teenage minds and mouths alike.

It seems, now, more a sight than a setting. It reminds me too much of what I've lost; and yet the salt of sweat and slivered stardom, of precious, gummy gems of life, beckon me to the streets. Where now, sunny and cher are revived by the chess set, small canopies replace familiar green, my favorite fried filler makes an appearance in neon light, the scent is stolen by something sweeter: a home not overrun, but overturned by time.

Rooftops

Could be the place where I am best portrayed, not placated in the summery night that ignored the fired skies, that pulsed harder than stone walks or forests at my toes. It could be the small piece of peace, precious in a city centered around strung wonders; how Christmas would laugh at the milky moonshine sunk around my feet. How memory replays and replaces mourning without a bated breath to bend back time.

It isn't sorrow under this blinking sky, shot by planes and island spires. This is what I missed. This heart of mine, this site of so much more to be said. If only love determined us, if only desire and not dank circumstance. And yet, in what was once severe oblivion, that pungent past is present and pulling at my insides, once maimed, once nicely numbed. So with it, chance. Or possibility. Roads kicked aside, run to dust, ravaged in the most remarkable of homecomings.

And still, however versed, however close to me I pull this night, I am unprepared for the weight of afterthought; I am unable to entertain more goodbyes.

Sour shapes

Penelope seems pertinent, with yet another nickname murmured in a silence I know I have grown. These shades of tales, sat upright on painted windowsills, are marked by fingerprints and the pallid, pressed beginnings that, breathless, defeated, are still fat with frantic love. Sometimes, absorbed with this smaller past, of evenings or lasting flights above spitfire waters and bombs we blew, I forget the larger past. The stacks of peaches lining my block; the heat of sleeping bodies on stone park mantels; the street murmurs and even might, broken or bloody, a blight far beyond my own.

There are small mentionings, a shock of auburn curls, a corner cafe with puffed chocolate pastries where I was re-given promise, already slighted, already shattered, but murmured with mechanised meaning, a metallic tongue. Nostalgia for this and then is now muted, but peaceful, so small compared to the nostalgia on my walls, my floorboards, in the musky closets of my home. At times, I hope for a haunting--of the house, of the city, of myself inside and the shock of reminders, the small sparks of air that part my lips to call your name, bend me backwards; into all sorts of sour shapes and selves I thought long gone.

What love?

I sit, in thunderstorms that bring back new memories, and write of love. But what love, where, how, can heal this time? Is it even love I so desperately want to slide inside of, or youth, or you and your bear arms, the promise you made to meet my young. Some kind of comfort that knows no road; that is barred and barriered, no matter how hard I throw myself at it, beg its opening of our skies.

In thunderstorms, I remember curling at the bottom of your bed, a shaken puppy, so protected that wet would curdle my skin, make me pull back as if bruised or broken, bent by a slivered sun.

At times, you, or Hannah, would drag me out into the rain, or then the boy I loved with each small part of my heart; and there, shivering, shuddering, I was only afraid of the cold.

Which is strange, as now no cold touches me, not inside. No rain makes a racket that I cannot laugh at, shed as sheep skin, leave behind. No, no rain, no love can numb this fire, so alive and so hurting when all I need is gone.

I try not to think of you now, which makes me guilty. Because even a small thought, of our bunny fur trip north, of a pelican or a big, uncooked burger; of small tips at restaurants, those tiny fish with beedy, broken eyes. They undo me in a way that leaves not shaking or crying but a stillness, motionless, the inability to feel for anything or anyone else. The inability to look beyond the roses, mounted in their glory, in their moments of blooming and never decline.

Which makes me afraid. For I know, that despite its own deficiencies, despite my need for you, it is only love that softens these small falls, whether my romance or my nephew and his new top teeth. Whether a best friend sorting through our childhood games, the familiar howling laughter, or the cutting humor of my mother. Whether you, where ever you are or have been, and the loud, unmistakable, daily declared love that you wrapped around me, your soft arm, my sheepskin throws and rabbit furs. Whether I can accept, or somehow live with, that, only that raw, rare love as your legacy, as a shelter, as the shoulder that once flattened my fears.

On lemons, and lashes

And now I will write of you, my slate-eyed love. For the curls of wine on your tongue, on mine, the wires of freckles, pebbled paths of your young skin. I will close my eyes and there, beside me, belonging to a night of violet skirts and penciled portraits, of spins to castles trapped in clouds, of walled windowsills, of the tooth I love the most, I will have your head heavy on my pillow, wet eyes, willowy wanting, quiet curls your curtains to push back.

I will close my eyes and we will reflect what has not been easy but brought by bargain with our slippery selves, Irish musicians falling faster. Our plastic cups stained pink or tangerine, our tongues all wanting, our eventual melding in the wake of mint tea and too many cheek-kisses goodnight.

Your thumping heart, of course.

I know this as our non-fiction rendition, fraught with life, that lived, livid experience that has broken both our hearts.

Having faced a devil, not ruby, but raw in the quickest of kidnappings, that opening to other worlds or other, dimmer, skies.

Then and now I am calmed by the still-present scent of you, so safe in the softness your skin, your mouth, your hands aligned on the fleshy cheeks that mark me home.

I imagine you and the silver-skinned fish above your mouth, your hand catching my sleeping head, our bright white beers, small parts of me in you: suckling lemons and jugs of coffee, couched creases of witches, white chocolate renditions and the flattening of pretense in loving, but never needing, fine wines and blankets, the softest, most forgiving lines of life.

If I were home, it would be an overcoming, like those southern melodies that gave my ancestors might, and beyond that mountain of mine, a falling, finicky, full flailing into love. And for you, maybe, it would be found in the achy tones, those bold bellows of women, show singers selling truth in throaty tears.

You and your lashes, your toes. Your spots, the markings that construe your past. Or the shared smiling eyes laid down, those whiskers having never pierced my skin.

I will write of you to make you real, to bring you back beside me, all licks of licorice and the custard cravings of your tongue. I will write of you to delay the aching, biting, to stare back at these familiar rains when you are hours, miles, skies away.

Rememory

I have never before looked at obituaries. Such key pages not an age I want to deny or defy, but now in a vague, virtual world of New York Times Guestbooks, I click and click, scouring the world, the web, my widened eyes for others' memories. Of course they entertain records of his street corner, saunter, his (blood-?) orange coat, the cool of cigarettes at his fingertops. The laughters--his, theirs, all streamlined by a leveled city wind.

Maybe this Morisson's rememory. When I try to picture him young, preceding me; when I pull at portraits o his own expeditions, soothing, somehow imagining that if I cannot go forward, I can fall backwards to him. Maybe in my mind I can relive ripe renditions over Korean barbecue or those speckled arms. Maybe if I squint hard enough to forgo bifocals, I will see not stars but steady, other eyes.

Roses

It wasn’t the anniversary that bit my neck, that broke open the wounds I hide well under summer dresses and the scant scandals that blister my toes. Not the memories of rooftops and such blue skies, or you and your camera bored by sun. It wasn’t even the photograph of chocolate and sunflowers, the square cake of buttermilk that brought tears to your eyes. When I had expected to be in torrid tantrums. When I bathed in coffee, sipped wine and waited for the wash of wanting to end.

What hurt the most this time, when I was supposed to hold you warm and smoky, feathered with chocolate and cappuccinos we sought out by the park; when I should have bought my millionth tie for you, were the roses in that garden I could not exit. I wonder why I walked inside, the green trellis too familiar, the scent once dreamy but now sour and syrupy in wet air. It was the roses, really, those fat, French flowers you so loved, withered at their stems, sad renditions of all romance and prose. It was the roses of ashen pink, flushed faces gone dry, that made my heart break in the cold of day with my children soft and laughing around me, a decadence of beaming teeth.

It was the roses and then the dreams, not the nightmares that frighten me, that leave me lying in my own arms awake, but the dreams in which you are living; or the dreams, even, in which you are dying but we have days. When I wake up it is days I want; just days for you to know that I need you. Days in which I speak the words I dream, ‘I can’t go on without you.’ In my dreams I ask you how I will survive you but there are no answers on your tongue; you only tell me that I will. And it is because these dreams are mine, not yours, that there are no answers; because I do not know deep inside.

It is only now that I realize moments not yet lived; of babies I cannot throw high enough in the air; I no longer want to write, really. The world is muddled, mute, so much less beautiful than what I saw before.

The flowers then, live, dreary at their deathbeds, make me run. I can walk through the trellis, but breathless and ill, want out of this blooming garden where small lives replace each other, where all vines ripen and rot.

Merchants

Can music belly misconceptions, melt on the tongue or the tail of what one thought was tragic, but was only trial (at most).

It's beginning, the slight, sighted storm. It's beginning, these familiar twitches that wake me and wash of faith. Could I belong in the same position as that dark, dimpled man? Could I be, at this marker of my life, a female version of his venom?

Ripe

I can sense the smell of mangoes from afar, when I reach for the phone. How silly, how surreal that the scents of that summer living look back at me now.

I can sense the meat of morning, the metal glances of the outdoor kitchen, yellow sandals that squeezed my toes.

I remember thinking to myself in the hardest times (which now, silly, syrupy in that sweet past, grasp me in giggles, in their ornate armor of youth) that this time would mark me. That I would not move beyond, but within and with those momentary glances at growth, at the feathery mornings so hot and humid that my breath begged back at powdered juice, the silicone dippers that I splayed and splashed my skin.

As if I was among the waves that willowy, slightly abandoned, lay down the road, of access only be bareback, or the long, lean legs of youth.

In a precious peach flavor, sticky as the drawn out dews I slept amongst; sharp as the beats of the fan that flattened those batting bloodsuckers, miniature, skeletal makings of god.

Somehow, now, in my attempt to contact them--to reach out to that small sliver of who I was before this, before I felt a monopolized, marginalized self. Of all the complexities implicit in learning love. Somehow now it seems so large a part.

They are giant these wings, these pattering tongues of my time in that shade, much tougher to leave behind--even now, years later and many miles, many mes away--than times in sun.

What Dreams?

As a point of pride in my third grade class, I pronounced that I had never needed a dream journal; the images poured themselves fresh each morning, delicate complements to my white bread rolls and pressed juice. These days, the daughter that I am, I dream of actual moments, sometimes waking in the sort of dapper daze that melds dream and reality. Despite their melancholy, I need these dreams to remind me that memory lies right behind, that this gauzy gaze of mourning cannot negate our own mornings, our many years.

And so, soggy with sadness, but still with strength, with the strides that I took beside him, I am thankful for this small inner gift, for the nights when I can remember his voice, when his sprinkled beard is fit and familiar. When his gaze looks back at me. In rest from the rest of the time, when the hurt curls and calls out, when even small moments of happiness feel awkward and imbalanced; when I feel I have forgotten.

Who

It's strange to look back at that park from afar, from the seat of a movie theater, or the lacquered library steps, where I thought only a year ago that I loved, how I loved with every inch and end of me. It was that time, with the pink skirt on Carrie's night out, it was that time when I curled in purple fish sheets, so fallen. I can't say that it hurts anymore, can't say it hollows even small parts of me. But there are nicks of nostalgia when the steps of my school stare out at me; when I want so badly to go home. To go back, really, to the metal park bench by that library, the bench and the belated words that decided this. To go back, to the fancied ice-skaters, the eighties music a melody I had not known to suck in and slip inside, I had not known to squeeze tight around my heart strings.

I had not known.

I had not known that the Brooklyn Bridge was no beginning, but rather begged me back to a person, a child, an adolescent so full of flippant emotion, so merry and mighty inside.

I can only compromise with being young these days; I can only try to hide the small grins that grasp me, that somehow tickle those torn pasts tonight, when looking back slightly aches, morose muscles of living I had forgotten were ever there.

These could be jupiter drops, the changed light of eyes at the mere opening of goldfish, splits seconds of august, at this disquiet I so dislike and yet cannot drown in momentary mists. I cannot unmake my own memories.

And so it was slippery tonight, maybe with the sounds of the city I so love, maybe with the knowledge that this is not what I expected. Maybe with the unpatched pattern of promise torn in front of me, so tempting to imagine again.

Or maybe, seriously, it was the smile of him. It was the noisy grin, that fat dimple eyeing me back. How strange it is that familiar greens can fawn familiar faces, those drenched possibilities still tears, but tamed; the roar of clawless lions still enough to make me lick my lips.

I don't regret; and yet, I still yearn for some sort of understanding, for an eventual last isolation of the emotion that colors my mind, that still makes its way back inside, the most untender of exile, my proud pathways to peace.

Inside of the movie theater, thousands of miles and thousands of hours away from it all, there is so much to say, so much steeped, so much stolen by our imperfections, still cold, those frozen fingers of our time.

Oxford, Mississippi

Eventually, I will be able to summarize in paragraphs, etch the hours of ancestry upon a page. Eventually, the stories will be mine, and I will spit them forth over meals, mark the air with laughter, however mild, however molded to spent time.

For now, however, I try to piece together the siding, the cherished, the choked out horror that only what we reminisce expels. For now, I tease a past that preceded me, tickled by the weeping palms and ports, of that very river all children struggle to spell.

I look in books for the beginning. I break open Faulker to adopt the tongue. I imagine my grandmother on a Mississippi street and my father, shirtless, in coveralls, snaking the sodded line of his fishing rod. I imagine a youth I could not have known; not human but continental, a local youth, a youth of drawls and jumbled grits, of Sunday dress and belligerent baptisms.

I wonder if I can really claim it as my own, that past, that ancestry, that fat of cornbread seeped through pores; posh pigs all sweated in those heirloom Augusts; a man who was not yet mine.

And yet, I wonder, without it, how different we would be. Whether those dawns would be of fantasy, or grim folktales feathered with forgotten stows. If collard greens would have graced my plate; if sear-sucker would have dashed my sister's marriage. If we would have perhaps seen those streets that lie smartly magical, a Marquez-land of sorts, spelled out by our father's childhood, the hoods, the quicksand of humid breathing. And yet akin to my fear of viewing movie-renditions of books that I love, I fear encountering that other Oxford, that southern city of his live accounts. I fear not saving a story already put to rest, my own modern Pompei of sorts, where women have denounced petticoats and have men shed their three piece skins.

Expectation

I have no greater expectation than disappointment, or dreaded, dark moments that make me gasp (grasping not for comfort, not for knowledge but for nostalgic narcotics, the brightest underbelly of human hand-holding).

Some days, especially those dressed in sun, I can curl in the very moment that surrounds me--beneath me, a proper love affair with life. Some days, I tell myself, that loss only prepares us for more life at our fingertips, for other days, however hard to wrestle through, however wet with tears or raw with passion. However imprecise.

The last time I was in New York, a close friend of mine looked at me over wine and French cuisine--lit up her eyes at the notion that I, who hid in closets to avoid leaving home; who checked in with my first love at least a dozen times a day; who was so afraid of small hurts; was now extraordinarily independent and strong.

I suppose I should be proud, tickled by this innate strength inside. But the reality is that of little choice. And I would forever choose my small, fanatic, frantic self over any type of human strength I have encountered and hoarded in these last few months.

It is not strength, anyway. It is worn will.

It is still loving the tastes and tenderness of life.

Times

This is the most inopportune time to write. But what are such times anyway-just big bends of constructed living, just ways to seem in control of turning suns that simply sink their teeth.

Maybe that is why I (oh yes me) am organizing. Why I am re-ordering the items of my room, when the much bigger things seem to be spinning and stopping, looking at me- awkwardly apologetic at chance.

Sometimes it really is ok-some things seem easy, even. Some emotions I let touch me, tough or tender, realizing only that I am accepting. That I am able not only to sip coffee and write it down, but also to dance, to seep in the satisfaction of sun, to laugh. I sleep when I am tired and wake without beckoning. I study some days for hours and others not at all. Sometimes I just lay on the lawn and rearrange my thoughts, bring him closer, or pull him out to ornately examine and ache for.

I have given up on the temptation of time, knowing only that it will all take time and that this is less than mysterious. It is only me-amongst my cardboard boxes, having dropped my gentle, fur-clad bear. Only me, still in certain summer dresses, still braided or curled or unbrushed in the morning hours when I have forgotten this saddest facet of fate.

Sun

Of course it was the sun, the certainty when the first reminder was left wet, a floated kiss I could not grasp within my palms or rescue from memory.

It could have been the photographs, tried, told, as torn as electronic worlds allow.

I can't tell which part is pretending, if the disappointment of dried mango, the dispersal of my recollection, if the yearning is even mine anymore. And where I belong is even more fluid, fought with in moments of frantic recall of being stark, being strong along the trembling, acrobatic line I never named.

Or is it that I am forgetting. Is it that I am replacing? Or reaching for small swaths to bandage the wounds, curls of laughter and crisp if candied knots upon my tongue?

The Hardest Part still haunts me; and with it American Pie. The shadows of trucks and trembling drivers, the traffic where I held my hand, my heart, out to the wind. It just takes two notes and I am knocked back into that past, portly with pretense, but particular in numbing my naivite. Only moments and I am promised fine wine ice cream and an eventual passing of the storms.

I guess, I suppose, in the icing that is nostalgia I must one day accept that such divine delicacies only came with attics and escalation. That, while I miss most my father, I may also miss myself; or us. Or then.

I miss the roast chicken dinners, the crease of smoke, even; I miss make-believing.

And so I've stopped screaming, stopped stomping, stopped complaining. The ease with which I approach my world at once entertains and drastically disappoints. The extreme inevitability of growing up brings sighs where there were once cries, sleep where there was once sprinting. I don't think I somehow feel less, but I have foregone my own avenues in a lull of exhaustion that seems circular and endless and, more than anything, awfully, endlessly, achingly unreal.

Play for Today

In the words of the Cure, 'Play for Today.' I am unsure if this makes me think of music or the fields of tulips, so fat with Easter spirit that I wanted back.

We piled into a car and drove to the Cotswalds, the land I thought England was, shallow valleys heavy with laughing Sheepdogs, disappointing fudge, rainwashed brick, the gray of dusk or dawn the everyday, every moment, every sidewalk and sideways, every sight of ours. I wonder if the sigh inside was the flutter of Anna's parmigiana melting inside, or the memories of plaid pants suddenly more meek than morose; if it was the deep muddiness of it all that melted all my edges, the sweet of jam and cream encrusted on my tongue. Or if I simply, subtly allowed myself to see without seeking, without looking for recollections or reminders, without sight of him.

And what I saw instead: country pubs with fat scones; a functioning flour mill; ducks in restaurants, unwarily waddling; abandoned schoolhouses; perfect chapels with the faintest of forest gauze; homemade ice cream stands and purple sprouting from a Cotswald town; pale blue eyes and endless rows of antiques; wine houses; a penguin home; palaces and pristine gardens; gaudy old women descending B&B steps; the elderly whiskers of portly husbands; tottering babes in broken sandals, awkwardly embracing the rain.

It is funny how, just like not thinking allows you to recognize, not pushing allows me to recall. I closed my eyes on the car ride home and he was there, certainly beside me (not in a ghostly way, but in the way that all memories sidle up and suck you in, allowing life to carry on both forwards and backwards, the Coney Island Whip a ripened core of life). I could see him smiling on the Wisconsin road, my eyes opening and closing, the pink of middle America sunsets ascertaining small, if bloody, births. I could see him with the cinnamon bread in his lap, country blues unbearable and inescapable on the radio, the scent of rental cars and curls of smoke that he promised would, could never wield themselves inside of his veins...could only feign the threat of poison I so thoroughly studied and sternly advised against.

And most of the time, I was smiling, sucking in the small romantic beauties that make this right. Only the smell of leather reminded me of his tawny coat; and this return, this moment of relaxation in which I find myself now, all the small memories I want to keep alive, reminds me that I have lost my confidante. That only my father would comprehend how the kiss of a shaggy sheepdog made me swoon, how the taste of rain chartered me back to our Nova Scotia cabin and the sooty sand that made me love blue. That I look, inside of my friends, my family, my notebook, myself but there is no relief, no release, no remedy for this severe silence I have stumbled upon.

No Volvere

There was a time when I knew how to write, what to write, when the words bled through me--shot such spires from my veins. All seemed at peace in those moments, a child curled in tulip sheets, one world wet against my eyelids. The words were my own tripping blues and I would sit there, knees against my melodies, mulled at night.

There was a time when Broadway was all I needed to alight my life--when pink flicks at sunset or porcelain cups of Corona cordoned all fears. When dancing on doorsteps was decorated or deviated from only in directing: in dealing such sour spades of love. How I loved then. How I loved my city, my spark, my storms.

There was a time when I clung to forgiving; all was accepted or enveloped. All I knew was the chipped smile of partnership and lightning stuck on thundering Sundays. All I knew was the fat feather of pillowed pretense.

I am afraid, I suspect. But also disappointed in this more grown up of self, fearful of letting it show, fearful of what, exactly, I am unsure. Of knowing there is not enough or there is not, at least, all that I want. That the single thing, person I need now is gone, having galloped to some corner unreachable, unwritable even. The truth is so simple and yet still cutting, crisp and calling of my core. This is not right--but rightness and righteousness are overkempt, overspent. I want to be the exception to the human, the mortal, the mortifying; I want one step backwards to sew closed whatever wound--of head or heart or soul--weakened all wisps of waking. If only the world functioned, filled on such robust, raspy, unreal emotion. If only this once I could return.

On Poems

'In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank.

I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.

Oh flesh, my own flesh, whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.'
-Pablo Neruda

---
Of course I miss my father. And I comprehend the aching, the iced desire to pull him close to me in walking, waking hours; the desperate grasp at his work shirts, curling up in the fur of his cashmere sweater; reading the last year's emails at length, time and again: my first desire for frequent forgetting. I comprehend my small acts of desperation in my intellect, in my heart.

Of course I wish him back.

But for all of the of-courses, the expected, that which is told to me, are the unexpected. The dreams that come. The sore sadness of the moon. The sourness of the most memorable moments; mistaking the mild for meaning. Such harsh regret.

I suspect that the moments won't become any milder, just more expected and that, as selfish as I know it is, I will remain not only disappointed, not only torn, but finally with the knowledge of what it is to really need. To look up and back and within myself for some sign, an impossible, inviolable signal of un-disappearing.

I know that the bandaids will all fail, if not at once, in the slow, slippery unsticking of real bandaids covering much slighter openings--the truffles and laughter, cleapatra outfits and purple wine undone as my kindergarden braids, soft bristles of longing always present and pressing at my insides; that the temporality of tempresses, of needle-like touchings, will only tickle and tear.

I suspect that I will break in tears at poems he suggested, the posibilidades of Neruda, the southern suck of Wallace Stevens sidling back time. And that here, at the beginning of every day, I will have to remind myself that there are other ways of belonging, that I can sleep without his shoulder, that--even missing a belief in spirits or otherworldly forces--such love still licks the wounds.

Amelie

I rarely think of Amelie these days, but it was the type of film that made me want to be a filmmaker, in the same sense that Beloved makes me want to be a writer, or Fire and Rain is an internal revamping of my imagined musical career. Beautiful art, we all know, is much more becoming than beautiful people. It beats so hard. It hails small slices of heaven that are, surely, steeped in our earth; the flippant kind of fallen angels that breath, talented, torrid tinkerbells that bite back or roar.

He tells me I will not be Amelie, today. That I will not insight eventuality, that I will not shatter, then melt. He tells me to cry or scream, to un-level my baths, to preempt overflowing. In my rationality, in my fixation on the flowered clock, I nod. I know. But knowledge is only power if it too is harnessed and hell-bent on expression; knowledge can simmer on the back burner for too long. There is so much I have known, long enough to turn back time and again, but also easy enough to forget, to recall only in small, sleepy ways, to tempt with touch or tongue but never embrace, other than oddly, awkwardly and after far too many suns have set.

It does not seem so bad being her, anyway. Or like her, rather. Amongst waves of Parisian disappointment but not daring death. It does not seem so bad to be so many things any more--tired, torn, cold, wild and/or true.

It seems that what is right (if there is such thing, if it is somewhat more solid than that fairy I feel back at) is somehow simple. Not easy but clear. Not quaint at all. And when I leave, less anxious, yet awfully absorbed in myself, melting seems mild: unless pointed at by witches, unless clicking our heels actually brings us home.

It is beautiful today. Or was, in that Oxford way that every sunshine passes too quickly, that we crave that golden drug to seep our skin so much longer, after so much winter has passed. It is quite pleasant now and the peaks or peeks of sunshine dribble out of the sky, the picture windows surrounding me somehow, suddenly appropriate. And home, it seems, lives in so many sides of me here, both simple to sidle up to, or suddenly suffocate with new surroundings.

The Asian Supermarket. Oh that is home. It is funny that I have never cooked Asian food, really (tonight is a small debut), but I have been inside so many Asian restaurants and basked in the glory of so many Asian meals, that each shelf, each bright item makes me sigh. First, the ginger candy, the rice paper covering, the charged childhood madness where Katie and I would cover out hands, our mouths in the sugared-spicy delight. Where I would request perfumes and her lychee fruits, reminiscent of who were to become. The mochi melting into puddles of pink and green; frozen shrimp with beaty eyes; tempura crumbs kicking at the dusty walls. The height of Kikoman soy. The joy of bubble tea. The kiss of passionfruit juice, juggled in a can. And then, at the bottom of a black plastic frame, the sugarcane.

Julie asked me when I arrived here, why I had sugarcane in my bag (it is a bit rare, I must admit). I began but never finished my real explanation, or the perhaps childish expectation, that I could access some other kind of memory. That memory that wakes up when I smell cigarettes at daybreak or hear the unfortunate voice of Bob Dylan on the radio. That memory that is so much more body than mind.

And so, at the supermarket, I am not Amelie. The tears fall swiftly, expectedly and without panic, I feel too tired to fight them back. Just the touch of the root on my fingers brings up my roots and our walks amongst budding produce, summer's flowers of food. And then we are sitting, side-by-side in our maroon minivan, the sugarcane roots across my lap, one so suckled in my mouth that my dad laughs and can't stop laughing. I know I am small, because his hand is huge in contrast to my knee, because my fashion show is one of pigtails and a heat-responsive shirt, which changes colors when I touch it and now has drips of spit-designed pink across the chest. My own widdled wings, my own small handprints in desperate grasps with the green giants that I suck dry.

And he is right today. I am not melting. I am sad, surely, but still smiling, laughing even at the adult I am becoming, or really at how little I have changed; at the fact that he called me solid, and the fact that I am surrounded by sesame seeds and bak choy, by so much spice and nuts, and then to my left, a new beginning, a barrel full of baked beans.

Gypsies

Are taxis in New York, in a manifestation of the politically incorrect, which speed farther north; are beggers in Decani; are belly dancers in our child's minds, or in the bells of Fleetwood Mac. I am thinking of them now because I hear such bells, such coins; because the bottom of this woman's skirt beside me shivers to the hearty, breathy beat of my delight.

I am still wondering about London. I am not taken, but torn. I am insistent on learning to love this city and yet, my own escapades have failed me. The gray of the sky sheds itself on the buildings, the ash of pigeons so much more than animal: body of urbanity rather than real, ripe, wretched plumes. I want that blood of Berlin, the way of opening my eyes with such slight, slow pleasure that I knew the city saw me back. That I knew it blinked its bright, yellow eyes and yet never revealed my most naked of noddings.

There is an incredible awkwardness here; between the fat, full center, or centre (in British speak), or centaur (in my imagination, of course). And the lax outskirts, with human hands too few and far between. It could be the lack of nostalgia that at once nicely numbs and disappoints, the impossibility of bringing back, of begging back or breaking open other, icey, aged lives. It could be that I am actually growing up. Or that it is hard, in the constant shadow of such sadness, to really look, to really bite open these streets of sweater-shops and shy bricks. To really love back.

Walking through the park, devoured by the tulips of the queen; squinting my eyes not to the sun but to capture the ornate etchings beneath Big Ben; red velvet cake coated in marscapone frosting, coconut, mango, buttercream cheesecake, ginger & sour cherry merengues, soft chocolate-banana muffins. That was my London this time. A Sunday roast in a wharf, long wandering, large, fluffy, HOT vanilla latte. Laughter and Gossip Girl. Down bedding and boiling bath. The raw reflection of all day tea. Top Shop torn to bits.

I could live in London if I had money. And the sooty certainty of this is not so different from the city I hold closest to my heart.

Churches

I have taken the steps of a church only a few times and two, the only two I can really recall were departures. In both instances I was trying, in the stall of a lime-lighted ladies’ room, to pull myself together, to tug out the tears that tore at my insides; both times I was facing death and somehow, both were my firsts, such blood on my dress.

When I see Bob, I climb the stairs again, an unlikely third. I am barely there. I am still wavering in the first minutes when my sister called me home. I am still staring, slightly awry, outside of my portrait pane…and still, still I am calling his name. When I see Bob, for the very first time, I am not yet in mourning but the morning has broken; I have made the phone calls, and my anxiety has broken my rituals, my rest, my raw need for relief. I am hoping he will pull me back. Not together, as all of my insides have been ruptured and rearranged, as my heart is half, as I am hardly able to breathe in my own heat, let alone float in this faraway place I chose (I chose this, I must remind myself) over the Atlantic, with so few tears in my eyes. My mind is somewhere else and it is not mourning. Nor is it shock anymore; but rather the red-pebbled markings around my eyes are entertaining, are explicating, that I too am somewhat gone. That my stork, whether wiry or old, shot dead by his own insides, leaves me wailing, homeless and thoughtlessly un-whole. I am small, I tell Bob, upon us meeting. I am too young.

I think all children, whether definitionally so, feel this way. What I realize, what I am told, is this. And yet my own stands out so strong, before the fuzz has drawn its way around his eyes, before his beard is marked only by gray writings and wings, before I am attempting to draw—and now to write—him out, in fear of forgetting and fretfully forging the wrong man. My youth suddenly pounds upon my chest and my rush, to retire, to conclude my studies, to reproduce is slowed to a Midwest paste, African or Latin American time, the ticking clock crushed beneath my flushed, flowered, bitten fingertips.

I am nowhere near ready to lose this person that I love so vividly, to be frightfully fatherless in a world, a way already misleading. I am nowhere ready to say goodbye. And so, my first frantic embrace today is that of our words, our conversations, the broken lines where he brought me, always, home: today it is this, in his e-mails, on the cold, white page through which we once spoke. Me: ‘Are you sure I did the right thing?’ Him: ‘100%...but to what are you referring?’ Just the sounds, the soft of the semantics speak worlds to me, unravel me into the piles of kisses, warm embraces, quintessential (and essential) quilts of love, I still—when smiling, when centered on the teetering tip-toes of my mind—can find, can feel, can smell across oceans and much larger, deeper voids.

Godinama

I am always reminded of the wealth of words. If in laughter, if in the shrill delight of spinning circles of children afloat on my lobby floor; if even in songs that I cannot understand semantically, but still bring to life little parts of self that lay waiting, awoken only by older expectations.

When I read my father's notes, as I now do, his poetry as impartial as his advice, the softest of harsh honesty, I am filled with longing: to be younger, to hear the words that I wait for in those few sublime moments before really waking, that built me this tall.

When this song begins to play, I am strangely light-hearted, rather than heavy with the nostalgia I know too well. I want to sing, to sidle up to this artist that I remember as apartment companion, curled up against the goldfish and nighttime mint-tea, music videos of war a world ago. Maybe they are not his first words of my native tongue, certainly they are unbitten lies, but they are also those that are known too well: "I have no canons that roar."

I was asked a dozen times today how I am. Before, in a dreamy desperation, I would break into tears; or spurt harsh inaccuracies--'I'm going to die.' Now, however, I do not know what to say. I am trying to maintain a certain numbness, so as not to break; I can only cope with the smallest realities. Ringing that number again and again. Missing moments. I can't touch the real grief, the real roar that arrives before sleep and before waking, that itches and bears its teeth at times. I am frankly far too tired to conquer it now. Instead I shield myself in small ways; not sheltered, but not shattered. Only damp.

There is roaring, however, in the apartment that bears our name. It is almost promise, but somewhat less certain, somewhat less civil. It wakes me up inside. I still belong with him, I know. Not stupidly, but in my own rendition of fiction, I cannot relinquish that smallest piece of hope, of awakening to his laugh, the scent of cigarettes, aftershave and rolled rs. And I know, when I trip on piles of life left untouched, when the whole world stops, suddenly, roughly, raggedly re-arranged. I still belong in his softest heart, his strong embrace, his sneaking smile, now reminiscent in my sister's Riley, our beautiful bearer of better days.

Ode to the New York Subway

What better brother than a blue-haired ponytail, sidled up as sloth, somehow close as kin. He is the first I look at with wide eyes, having momentarily forgotten the event, entertainment, sheer show of riding the New York subway alone.

To my left: a middle-aged man with a waist-long gray ponytail. Somehow, he has attempted (and mostly failed) to die it blue. Not sky blue or the blue of seas, but an almost navy that is somehow sadder than the gray.

To my right: a middle-aged man engaged in deep conversation with a nine-month old; complaining about his hair. "I wish I had your hair" he announces, to the child that swats at him in serious delight. "It stays in place, unlike my hair, which is just too silky." The mother tolerates him and the baby, when he turns the other way, swipes his hat and gloves.

Then the mariachis come on. Perhaps the expectation would be a muse at the music, but all heads turn downward and ipods are produced in sync and in such hurry that I know dollars are at stake. Small children look up and dance with their heads; I am made dizzy by the combination of live Mexican music and the speakers in the ears of the pony-tailed man beside me, loudly playing "Touch My Body" by Mariah Carey.

I have a seat. And I sigh at this delight, in my exhaustion, as having a seat is akin to winning the local lottery. It is worth the two dollars and the pretense at personal space (somehow always overwritten by the reality of subway riders) pulses through my veins.

That is, until, I am on the red train. I stand waiting on the 42nd street platform, where hoards of people sing and dance, beg and beckon. Between the drums, the chimes, the bartering and the consistent converting, my body shoots into a sensory overload I must have earlier become accustomed to. I laugh. I laugh out loud and, expecting to be noticed, look down embarrassed. However, in this world, this city, on this platform in the mud of midtown, I certainly do not stand out. My laughing cannot be heard above the chorused renditions of Somewhere Over the Rainbow or seen through the frozen, human statue of Michael Jackson in drag.

I have reconsidered my pre-conceived notions: there is no need for shrooms.

When the Number One train arrives, my racket of reality hurries past the orange warning line, forming herds, or hoards, or other shallow human patterns. The train is full. An old man at the front steps off to let the train clear and then is summarily pushed aside by the waiting passengers, thrown into this sea of creatures scantily clad at the first sight of summer. He is left off the train.

In his place, it seems, and directly pressed against my side, is a sketchy man of about 35. He groans and veers forward, his body contact almost entire. Between us is a bag and a seltzer bottle, for which I am eternally thankful (thank god for my laziness in throwing away empty containers). He smiles at me with shiny gold teeth and I turn up my ipod, the Kooks a perfect companion for this eternal experience (forty five minutes, I reckon), this delightful, distasteful, distinct of making my way home.

Sandman

I do not know the name of my sleeplessness. My one night of pleasant dreams played a trick on my mind. As now, I am back to the heat, to the wide eyed wonder, to the internal begging for exhaustion. I make my nest full, feather pillows under my neck, above my head, in my arms. My mother too goes to bed in a chair-nest, a reminiscence of our childhood concoctions, the love-seat her cliched sandman.

Although I try to exhaust myself by running, limiting the flow of coffee to my veins, there is a period in early dawn that I somehow cannot conquer. How uncharacteristic, that I entertain the notion that I do not fully control my fate.

Circles

When Julie arrived in Berlin, she brought music. She brought songs that would become the certain soundtracks of my immediate life. We sat at the bar beneath my house drinking hot toddies, on my couch in piles of chocolate and cheese. Everything seemed simple, but still ached inside.

It stuns me, looking back, that one of these artists was Sophie B. Hawkins, a hearty lady of my childhood blues. Somehow, she saw me through adolescence, and so in my post-poned teenagedom, she flashed her eyes again at me. Such circles we leave in, drawn by our very own toes.

Last night I dreamt of dancing. It was the first night that I did not wake breathless or in fear. It sounds dark, but it's honest. Though I was awoken, my heart was quiet, filled only with imagery of Brazil, sword-dancing and henna-covered hands. All was at peace, for a moment, the soft fur of my blanket warm against naked skin. I remembered what it was before, the soft of my cotton cocoon.

I suppose mourning is a process through which we encounter more and more of such moments, mere seconds of normalcy, impartial panting, soft sighing of our insides, too tired of being torn apart.

Candy Tunes

“Let’s make music.” Or is it magic that he spat, my head sat hard across his lap, the pink fluff of carpeted living like fairies of my eyes. Among the heat of Indian summer, sidling up to a childhood hardly lived, on that brink of adolescent laughing, he was my doll. I knew it wouldn’t be a love story, or one broken by the bells of passion, or one cried through the corded tears that only cold canteens contain; but still, in the weaving in and out of fingertips, in the morbid bellows of his eyes, I knew my own mortality. It was in fear, then, that I murmured my mistakes, that I lived longingly and largely, still forced to uncurl in the fat bubbles that always remain at the end. I saw clearly through, from the beginning, but still unfolded evenly like a grinning gambler’s hand of cards, a straight, perhaps, or a flush the color of park tulips, churned underneath our toes.

And still he played. With both me and in nightclubs, in city diners, in mall hallways, no places of his dreams. The raw reality could sit against our own, in its iced eternity, our promise, not hot but heavy as our pasts. I began to see that all love, like moons, like murmurs, like the cries of animals in vengeance or vein: all love is music, is caught in candy tunes. All love is martyred, is given in or given to or given up for other, bigger wants. As children do, I kicked my legs against this; I shattered things with hands and words; but I wished in the drying streams of my insides, in my veins aroused with air not blood, for our love, so far from embryonic, so fat and full of pasts, to kick back.

It had been years, I would yawn, decades almost and we were still like tickled twins. Sometimes, his voice would echo in my head as my own, or he would interrupt my sentences, a hurried guessing of robotic thoughts. Love, love, love I would sing to myself, safe inside our cotton cocoon, unknowing or unable, perhaps, to pick at the strings.

On Saturdays and Sundays, I worked in a downtown restaurant with a blue balcony and brandished name. By balancing plates and placating, by making mostly friends, I found distraction to help the hours pass; I found a velvet place of my own. I would think of him then too, but somehow separate, even when he would visit and extend small offerings that, gold and glass, glimmered back; I would accept the pink bags—brought back to that carpet we purchased on 171st street in a frantic fit of domesticity—and extend to him a kiss of the cheek. Always left with wet wonder, with the type of tears that rest restlessly in the outer corners of our eyes. It was the hours upon hours of standing, simulating, at times, the dancing of my mother’s toes; the red wine stains on diner mugs; a melting into the city I had previously, unrighteously, claimed mine. I found it healing, or more honestly, hallowing; it allowed me not to feel too hard, to paint my lips a purple-red and grin at the ghouls that inhibited our urbanity at night.

It was falling out of love. I remembered all the articles, the stories, the novels I read on falling in, not tripping but melting quicker than our city snows. I found it hurt more, however, to pull away; it involved bending backwards, tripping so many times that my knees resembled those of toddlers, cut from the mere storm of walking. I could not crawl even, in those winter months, when my inside beat harder than my brawn. When all smelled of him and the heat of wood, his silk skins a stolen sweater I had worn.

Here

I am here, where you belong, somehow transported to your space. But this embrace, dad, is bear, it bears no similarity to your own. Where are you now, closet smoker? Where are you hiding in these cracks too small to sneer? I am waiting. Waiting on the corner where you work to see your saunter; waiting by the Italian arc to hear my name.

I cannot leave without you. And so I sit here, implanted poorly in the world that is not mine, among your own, your art, my you. Missing you, dad, is marking it all as mine. Your phone in hand. Your computer pounding at my fingertips. Hoarding all that is left; the small of entities ascribed to you; the smell of closet up in arms.

I sit by the Venesian cafe where we sipped espresso and cream, chugged elderberry sodas when they were still somewhat foreign. I sit by the stoop where I arrived after school to announce myself and annunciate our closeness.

I sit here and wish back, want back, go back by closing my eyes just enough to blur the beings, the breaths around me. Even in spring, I hope for your snow.

Place

There is no perfect place, or space that speaks to all insides. But there are places, which in moments lie unmarked by mystery; that, serving emotion or experience, fit full with life. They are not always the expected areas, but life nooks, not neat but naughtily unique.

It is strange that upon returning home one of those very places constantly occupies my mind; and it is not a place in this city of mine. It is where wind chimes sat above lady faces, couches lay perpendicular to the sun, my books tampered and torn in my lap. It fits strangely now, as it was one of the hardest times, but raw in a way that I am missing, so hotly honest, so opposite of hollow. I would wake there in night sweats, position myself close to the fan, and then wake again at dawn in the grasping glow of morning.

When I think of it now I want back, I miss that summer smell, the roar of colors set in plaster and plastic on the walls. It reminds how we are made of memory and how mine, however set in shards, murmurs noisily with nostalgia.

Symmetry

I feel as if I pushed everything inside and then it was a mix of melting and mourning, wanting to somehow be alright with it all, what I would not have chosen before. I pulled into me all that was surrounding, whether right or wrong, to shield me from the rawest of it all: what lies in my head in sleep and waking hours, gnaws at my dreams. The strangest part, is that now it hurts more honestly but the relief is just as harsh; I can sleep through the night, I can let myself cry, and I can still want what I wanted before. I don't have to settle in any way. I don't have to hold on tight to what I know is not right for me.

I guess that pairs are not synonymous with symmetry. I can feel free and suddenly mourning what I have lost in my father; I can forgive myself for not always loving right, or who I should love, for having to try, make wrong decisions along the way, but in all of it still believing I will have what I have, at one time, known so well.

I am really proud of both of us for not settling for what is less, for what is cutting honesty, and for this maturity I have never before known. I am not even angry inside.

New York, on the other hand, is not a city of symmetry, itself; it is not a city that can be sidled up to. But it is a haven in the most hearty of sense. And finally, here, now, I don't feel so hollow; while it hurts, I'm whole, it's home.

What I am so afraid of is really the fear itself, because the most daunting but demanding decisions, those that we know the (difficult) answers to, are exhales to make, flattening of too-full lungs, a fancy unraveling of that which already lies at our feet. I have to laugh, when thinking, knowing that the decisions have long been made but unspoken, always in ice. Suddenly, it all seems symmetric. Not perfect, not easy, but far more fitting. And there is little more that I could ask for, that I want today. I feel almost guilty in the glutton of release.

Dragon Fire

I used to say that I was a young American woman of the rebel generation: a
liberal, one who has invested her heart in Western Europe's social
successes. In adolescence, I looked over the Atlantic with hazy eyes, a
young girl in love for the very first time, softening my thoughts when
considering that continent: not only of cobblestone streets, not only of
ancient castles and tongues, but of acceptance, inclusion, ethnic
understanding. There where the words of racism would not be spoken. In my
naiveté, I thought of it not as silence but of a thunder already come to
pass.

Growing up in New York City, I experienced the words, wonderings, walks of
many cultural groups. I witnessed multi-ethnic, multi-racial gatherings of
friends sipping cappuccinos on Broadway. I witnessed inter-cultural
kisses, marriages, children birthed and raised with utmost success.
However, I also witnessed the formation of social fault lines, which broke
open along what we call "race." I came to know those who were simply swept
inside the shattered earth of our spoken quake, our
discrimination—-segregated, excluded, omitted in both the public and
private spheres of minds. When glued back, these lines left
not only crooked societal scars but the remnants of men, women and
children torn by preconceptions, misconceptions, rhetoric that gave way to
the vile actions of countrymen, neighbours with bluer eyes.

This is why I loathed the words. This is why I believed they should not be
spoken. Without the proper vocabulary to hate, the rivers of the mouths of
those who sought to hate would fast run dry. They would choke on the
absence of the words upon which depravity depended. This linguistic
emptying would hollow them of their ability to act. Yet in my world, the
words—black, white, Asian, African American etc.—cluttered, hyphenated,
uttered not in whispers but booming orations, took center stage. They were
spoken by those who hated, by those who feared they could hate and by
those who hated the hate. Aloud, we believed they were normalcy: but I can
still today feel the hesitation of each heart that utters the words of
race, a Pinocchio nose within us both as individuals and a society that
spurts forward with each uttering of what does not exist. Thus
came forward my question, screamed in my ears by the graffiti streets of
Berlin: is it better to speak of, attempt to make real, that which is
biologically impossible or is it better to silence the words even if we
cannot silence the acts that those words breed?

I am more afraid of the nameless. I am more afraid of the words that
cannot be spoken. I am more afraid of those who say to me, in that city,
at once a great tombstone and womb of European history, that there is a
single race, the human race. I am afraid, because even with thousands of
African migrants, the Berliner politicians assure me that this is not a
topic of importance, it is not spoken of; they hush me not with words but
with their own hazy eyes. I am afraid, because refugees are housed among
extreme rightists without second thought. I am afraid, because integration
policies, set not in stone but in words on plastic pamphlets, seek to
quiet the cultures, to forcibly assimilate, make German ethnic and racial
groups. I am afraid of the ultimatum—become deutsch or accept ostracism. I
am afraid of the fires that burn beneath, rather than upon their tongues;
even lacking the dictations, they are dragons of such bigotry.

In the words of Toni Morrison, language alone protects us from the
scariness of things with no names. Although we have created cruelties with
our words in the United States, here in Germany they live and breathe too
without them. Until these parasitical norms can be spit forth
in the breath of murderers, martyrs, civil servants & civil society, their
worminess (burrowed inside mind and mentality) will hinder change. Europe,
just as the United States, has thus far failed in creating civic
nationalism. Here too, where east meets west, where walls of bipolarity
have been both built and torn down, lies deep racial and ethnic
discrimination.

We have lifted an iron curtain only to veil (rather than avail) the
continent in ghostly curtains of quietude. No matter what the distancing
of mouths from minds, only actions are authentic orators: they have spoken
and continue to speak. Why do we never think to silence steps taken? Why
do we think only to silence sour words? We have washed out the mouth of
post-war Germany—deportation cannot be uttered, race cannot be
whispered—but neither history nor the present can be cleansed with such
linguistic scouring. We cannot make a fairytale out of this castle-laden
land; the haze of the air fettering our eyes is not a marker of
enchantment but rather verbal renunciation. Instead of burning that which
may lie upon the dragons' tongues, we must bring forth from the womb of
history the unfortunate reality that lies in human hearts: coming
forward, bearing witness, to the truths that have been birthed with no
name.

Licorice Roots

Licorice Roots

I want to say, present yourself
See you streaking
In this sour cherry sorrow
If spiced, speckled pickling jars
Or jaundiced, juggled peppers
Are to blame

Blew fire in your heart

If I were to speak now in breeds
Draw out own rains
Yell your sad rendition of revolution
Still, I would be stifled by the smart soot of society
Pubescent parsonage of flamed companion

Your rhyme, rhythmic reason
Would sever the cigarettes I had hated back
The bluest of sewn crystal burrowed in your tongue
Schrewd seed of starved expedition
A bite
Your wet, woolen blink of the wind

In mourning, I too would wish wings
We all wish wings upon our dead
Not in entertaining heavens, hollowing heathens
But in access to an excess of age
Able to edge beyond owned ways
Trump black tears spit in battery
A lacquer licking as wounded as changed time

Such starvation from my licorice roots
Will linger, lie sweated but still
You, our blue-eyed beast
Tantric tale-teller
Will harbor your jalapeño strands
Your red beard never grown ghoulish, or gray

My smallest part will fall with you
Or follow you
My drenched Indian bear
Welled
With taught tears of adoration

I am certain you will mind her there
Wrap her in the rabbit furs of Russian dolls
Push back bent fringe from her eyes
Yawn in the evenings to ascertain
Such somersaulted love

Only you will level with the meaty moons
That will somehow grow her old alone
Without the wicked scent of smoke, or secret sweets
Only porcelain promise
Rather pickled, peppery
A touch of trying
To justify
To juggle life lost

Babylon

I am awake far before dawn; I know it is the early night in bed, broken by dreams of running or running out of what is most precious, the softest of time.

Walks to the kitchen are interspersed with first trips, bruised toes against arrangements that never were before, broken boxes, piles of possessions hard, harsh, in value hollow. I am unsure if I am home.

My mother and I cook pasta, sit at the wooden table with our legs crossed away from each other, too sad to let the silence sit, to sip slowly. Instead we push down drawn delicacies, we know not to loiter in these moments that, admittedly, are harsh, that hurt.

Sicily was beautiful, a Babylon of sorts. The winds were certain, the water curled around the island's belly, a blue changling as simple as my eyes. It was at once a relief and a reminder. I was overly pleased with the pizza, red wine, garlicky pasta and perched mountains. It was empty of tourists, cold for the beach.

The salt, the fishermen, the fried cannolis paired with cappuccinos, even in kisses they brought tears to my eyes.

Julie tells me to write it all down. The hurt, the love, the loss, the hope: what I want isolated but in actuality is intertwined in my every day.

It is as much about mornings as mourning. Like my mother, I wake in a daze, time spaced in shorter intervals, with the fallacy, the feeling that I can pull back at life's leash and have him here.

I dared Tom's with Tess, still full with fried fat and the bitterness of egg creams. The Hungarians, I hope for, but I am held back not by what is broken, but rather the needles of the unknown or uncertain, what is underneath it all.

Laughing at His Toes

My first chosen project was a journal, jotted alternatively with love notes and signatures of civil war. I lay below my emerald awning in the evenings (a dense Dorothy), entertainting, articulating, escaping inside to Lebanon. When I open my books today, they overflow with love, the littlest of notes and flat photographs begging the bored blue of his eyes. I know I chose because of him; and while embarassed, it was my youth, it was my doorway into this messy, bloody, broken world. My own edgy rabbit hole.

So here in the world of Alice, of unlikely love, I transfer myself back to such a sordid time, of tough tears for those I did not know, short shock of peppermint sweets, curdled sweats, the swollen crest of Kosovo in flight. I loved him them, suddenly, certainly and drew the lines of my life around his fierce, if wounded, frame. In him I solidified my passion, kicked up the dirt of his road with frozen toes, shook with tiny teacups in my palms, the spitting fire of boiled coffee and grand, if ghoulish, graffitied walls.

And then to Bosnia. Expecting, entertaining a future fled to in crumbled Sarajevo that crumbled crookedly and at cost.

Today, wandering still in this limitless loss, I am also building on love...if now legacy. I am engaging, making my way back to the world my father lighted, my father loved. In a way, I believe he is there, dsplaced, floating, fishing on his freckled back. Maybe he will find me in that south, because here he cannot be harkened. I hear only his hearty echo and his remorse at over-cooked meat. I see his pride, melting from his pores, a salted ham or sturdy sea bass laughing at his toes.

If I was in Oz or akin to magic queens; if I found a genie or was more of a superhero than adorned in Superman roos, I would grow no bigger or smaller; I would not ask for another heart.

I would wish him back.

And so for him I will go, meld my imagination and mystic in one; be mighty, if I must, but always un-whole. I will speak in his jagged drawl, just enough so that when I un-close my eyes I accept some part of this, however small, as mine. That I re-recognise hurt as healing, that I am again both helpless and hearty in loving. That I find my way back, if crookedly, if severely imperfect, to the same hard-footed child, to the flight of fairytales, to my father.

Crazy Faith

I am uncertain of where to look. In the broken drawers, perhaps, or the cardboard box I once used to remain home. I don’t know where to find you, to unleash your laughter, to reiterate your promise of permanency.

I think now, again and again, of the time when I came home to the open doors, the dog gone, you and mom having left with the curtains curled around the wind. I remember the flowered love seat on which I tucked my knees, the hot tears marking your departure. How I mourned you then, pre-emptively, convinced of obscure wrong. Breathless in an apartment filled only with air.

That was not the time. Nor my refused departures to camp, nor my need to be told each night that nothing, no beastly beetle of reality, would crawl into my heart. Perhaps the fairytales were the shell, the protective angle or earthly angel under which you could operate, young fallacy of perfection. Perhaps you knew my fears, in all of their extremity, were real.

Because now, I don’t think I was a child hypochondriac. I think I was a child. In that children see much more clearly into our world, are not armed with masks that mould themselves to desire, don’t falter on the fragility of fantasy. They don’t seek to explain, are hard pressed to understand, what at its very core is not god or gained emotion, but simply wrong.

I think also of Vieques, ice-cream sandwiches melted in my nailbeds, my metal pen. I think of our gypsy escapades to entertain horses, photographs and videos of empanadas. Running hand-in-hand from town or me wrapped around your shoulders, a wild-haired extension of sorts.

I called again today—and your phone, to my dismay, had been disconnected. I wanted to hear your voice, as of course I knew you would not be there. My messages of yours—they too have expired. Where can I find your voice now? It is not my own. And while still familiar it is ever quieter in my head, only whole whispers real in memory.

So many parts of me are you, of course. They are starved for contradiction—most absurdly alone in their relation to you. Sometimes, I wish all of me were that way, and other times, I can’t stand to see my,your, upturned nose.

I want to call you to say that I have found so many of Alice’s entrances into other worlds…from her windowpane onto Christ Church meadows, to her rabbit hole well. That at least some of it is real. I want to write you to remind myself to remember it all: snowfilled walks, the Hungarian cafe, your dinner comedy skits, benefit banter, your baby blue eyes. I tell myself I will not let you be gone. I go to sleep in fits of refusal, certain you will come back to me. And when I dream of you, of childhood, I sleep soundly, lured in by conversations that cannot be; but then, wandering into adulthood, I awaken to the re-breaking of my heart.

Sometimes, I am certain that I will return home and see you again. Certain that I will climb the stairs to the roof and you will be there in a wooden chair, chuckling, camera in hand. Or you will arrive from the Caribbean coast, a fat bass to your name. This is the real impossible. And yet I have to fight my crazy faith every day.

I know in this corner of the world I can pretend, with pretence harder and harsher than my many years of games. With better endings. Without the phone calls. Without the fear. But back on Broadway, memories are melded in the urban landscape; and yet I am somehow less afraid of harshly hurting, of burning to the beat of pigeons' wings, than of eventually exorcising our past.

"You said Kosovo wasn't a country, Kiki. I think you should think again"

Finally.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Kosovo-Independence.html

Centers

There are centers of gravity, everywhere, always. Signs of normalcy, of self. And then there are the moments that break such crying clouds, burst forth with life that shatters even the wings of wicked birds, that beg forgiveness with all blood of the skies.

I can't crawl back inside of the moments I might need: I am already forgetting. Voices echo from other places, wells of mourning. Some throw their hands up in the sky, others hang their heads in shame. And I remain, harshly hollow, on the other end of it all. I can hear their laughter; I can feel the fat of tears. And yet nothing touches me, there is no fingerprint found on my skin. Embraces, candy kisses are somehow foreign, sugar free.

I want to say that I don't care.

But that would be my mask, merely. It would be another layer under which to hide the youngest, rawest, most un-ready part of me. It would be another racket to drown out the real, wretched sound. The silence.

Firsts

There are always more firsts to come. Today is the first day I pick up the phone and call you. Suddenly, severely, it clicks inside of me that you are gone. Such moments are fleeting, however, fended off by frantic salvation. I am so afraid.

I don't know where to look. Up or down or inside of myself somewhere. To my mother, my sister, my friends. To my past.

I wanted to tell you tonight, dad, although you are gone, that I found blackcurrant and licorice candy, all wrapped up in one. And I laughed, to animate both of our delight. I wanted you, our past, our friendship, all of it, so intensely that I fought tears on the street.

But I know you are here, somewhere, and I will find a way to you each day.

Periwinkle

I don't think my father knew that my favorite color was periwinkle when I was a child (such useless knowledge, acquired from the stub of a crayon). He did know, however, the changing shade of my eyes; the clouds in my eyes; my culinary tastes; exactly how to always summon a laugh.

I know my mother does not want to speak of him, now. Only in generalities, only in gentleness. But I want to remember his long, loving relationship with our red puppy; his conversations with neighborhood lunatics; the day he cracked eggs on her head; how heavy he was on lemon in tea. I want to remember the birthday party where he shattered the pinata to our delight, his evenings in Telluride sipping coffee, dancing on Dennis' barn floor, our sipping of champagne at stuffy functions. I want to remember that I wanted him, always, as my companion at school and college events.

I am lucky enough to have his photographs, which document who he was. The portraits of self, neighbors, us. Angels wings. Always newly bloomed flowers. Roofs at daybreak.

I feel a need to write it all down, before I forget any of it. Each new memory certainly priceless and precious. If the most recent Christmas where he gave me a guide to Guatemala for our summer trip. Conversations in Spanish on taxis and buses. All of us in fishing gear, waist-deep in Newfoundland. Carousel rides and giant coca colas. Fat tubs of popcorn at our weekly movies. Ice-skating at Rockafeller Center. Creme brulee at Matisse. His beard. How he held chopsticks to attack the small snacks at the Mill. The day he ordered blood sausage only to frighten us. His sedar interruptions. The soft sunspots on his hands. Our pact to stop biting our nails. Our center in the seas. Spilling my heart at the Hungarians.

On the other hand, it would be hard to forget my father for even a moment, as he is so much a part of me. My eyes. My nose. The shade of my hair. My laughing spot. My obsession with photographs. My ability to retreat. My intellect. My love of Spanish. My love of poems. My love of food. The small cynic in me.

The hardest part

Is dawn. When I wake to sunless mornings and seek him out on the tiled floors. I still hold such expectation, to trip across the kitchen and climb into his arms.

I smell coffee and smell his smile. I see orange and suddenly my whole world melts.

Today, waking to emptiness, artfully decorated in my sister's farm tee, I can feel my heart, not beating but begging him back.

The hardest part of this life without my father is the everyday, is the lack of eventual peace, is the impossibility of wholeness without him. Is knowing so intimately the hollow of a broken heart.

Fish Whisperer

My father was our dreamweaver, book devourer, entertaining intellectual. He was the fire in the room, the charisma, the laugh whisperer in a sear-sucker suit.

I remember seeing the movie Big Fish a few years back and thinking only of my dad. Amongst fairytales of shoe-lined trees, characters of all shapes and sizes, and the most solid, certain of love, it was the paramount picture of my father. This film had gazed, however briefly, into our small world.

When I was a child, my dad read me stories from rainbow fairytale books before sleep each night. Many nights, he would fall asleep in the moonlight by my side, after having worked a dozen hours at the hospital and another three as my storyteller. I remember looking over him, meeting his familiar gaze with my own, urging him to go on: pulling open his eyelids with my small, fat fingers, curling up against him like a kitten with loud expectation. Finally, one day, I set my short-legged body into full gear, whipped the mattress from atop my bunk bed and set in on the floor, so he could fall asleep mildly each night and be only mine (A failed attempt, I see today).

This was, of course, after years of positioning him with his arm around my shoulders and my head in the nook of his chest so that I could fall asleep in the one place I knew certainly safe, where I could enter the other world we shared: of sharp-toothed witches and pining princes, of gnomes and princesses perturbed by peas, of a New York City psychiatrist I knew only as my pillow, my confidant, all mine.

In Big Fish, before the main character, storey-teller, father passes away, he is lying in a bathtub, fully dressed and his red-headed wife, in her dress, climbs on top of him and summons up their love. This is my mother and father, Redcat and Ted, who always came back to each other, never hid any of the sides of their truly passionate love. Who, in all of their cuddling, screaming, kissing, laughing, crying, loving, were life partners in the truest sense: sharing 5am coffees and 6am baths; weekend walks; visits to the botanical gardens and cat litters on the Mexican plains.

Despite the storytelling, which extended into our everyday, despite the fact that my father dreamed up our first imaginary friends, led by Rinkadink, a wild-haired girl akin to my sister, the world that I shared with him was not only one of fairytales. It was of rice and lemon tea, midnight dashes to Toms Restaurant. One of fierce intellect, photography, Caribbean seas, fried chicken and fishing. One of laughter, as all of my father’s relationships are. But most of all, it was one of unquestionable love. My father loved us, my mother, my sister and I, with everything he had and far beyond that point. He taught me to love myself unconditionally, to eat heartily. and laugh lightly at every chance. He healed my broken hearts. He always begged the best of me.

I want to thank my father for knowing how to pull me out of my own depths; for kissing my nose; for our last vacation together, when we fished at daybreak, ate our (well his) catches, swam in tide pools, roasted pork fat and slept at dusk tired from the sun. I want to thank my father for showing up always at airports, for being there in youth, adolescence and adulthood to warm my heart. For singing Beach Boys songs in Karaoke with my best of friends; for searching Canada for a proper sheepskin rug; for always allowing me my fears; for knowing how to pet my head; for breaking through bad moods of all of us; for picking me up at any moment, anywhere,; for introducing me to the wonders of licorice and salt; for never, ever limiting our candy intake; for saying only “hug me” when he saw my face break into sadness only 3 weeks ago; for always being proud; for proclaiming his love every day; for hard honesty but certain softness; for being unabashedly bold and bestowing that boldness on us.

And I will speak quickly of the others, for my father was not just ours. My father loved his friends. He reached out, always, to his neighbors, to his colleagues, to local homeless men who needed a smoke or friend. Children loved my father instantly—he spoke to them with respect and honesty, knew how to swing them into the air and entertain imaginations most adults can’t even comprehend. To this day, I walk the streets of Morningside Heights and am greeted by those—doctors, store owners, the hardware store man, neighbors’ children, local skitzophrenics, and their eyes, their mouths all beg the same question of me: where is Ted? I do not know what to respond except that I know he is here, everywhere, not just in my heart, mind, memories, but in the literally thousands of lives that he has saved.

I guess what I can say, today, at the end of my father’s tale, is that he has had true love, been truly loved, has spun straw into gold time and again, and has given us girls (often to others’ shock or dismay) incredible, inviolable personal strength. As a healer, photographer, storyteller, comedian, writer, intellectual, companion, but most of all husband and father, he has, with great compassion and humor, protected, enlivened and loved his family. It may sound cliché, but I am sure, as sure as I am of these memories, as I am sure of my own self standing here today, that no one could have been a better father. That I was blessed to have had a moment, let alone 24 years in his heart’s gaze.

In the words of Pablo Neruda, dad 'I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; I love you because I know no other way.'