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.'

Dawn

Perhaps it is too soon to write. But with dawn already broken, bent around my shattered heart, I have nowhere else to go but inside of myself. It is my father’s time of day, before the sun, a curled up kitten mewing open the morning, our old alleyway empty of life.

The old streets here, the romantic rains, nothing can shield me or send back the one man I know I will always love.

And today, as I sit here, wanting to write, nothing beautiful comes out. The whole world seems suddenly ugly and empty.

I cannot put into words what my father has meant to me all of my life. He was the one to chase away childhood witches, who taught me how to read, to write and, more importantly, how to love. He is the one with whom I shared rainbow books of fairytales, foreign language, fat steaks, licorice and salt. He taught me to admire Spanish and lust after Central America. He taught me how to laugh—in a sense that shakes and shudders your whole self—a kind of crisp, consuming laugh only my father could entertain in me.

My father is the rarest kind. The kind who treasures his babies in snugglies, who lets his daughter curl up against him in order to get to sleep for years, who still picks you up when you are in pieces at 23 years old. Who knows how to hold you against his chest, to kiss your nose always through the tears.

I can’t say what I will miss the most. Cups of lemon tea on cold winter afternoons; photographs of dewy flowers and family fights. The sound of every day. Of the hardest, most heavenly of laughter. The echo of sizzling collar greens. Summer saunters, summer walks.

I want my father back to assure me that there will be no more volcanic eruptions, no more broken hearts.

In the end

And in the end, the heart breaks. After all of the walls, the sharpest of swords, the world is naked, the heat hails from inside. The only weapon left is wind.

I spent my entire life trying to protect myself from such madness. Begging my parents to promise me that nothing devastating could destroy my small world. And now I know that there will be no one to explore New York's best burgers; to sip tea with at daybreak; to know every right moment to embrace me; to share Korean noodles; to take photographs of flowers; to call me Kissyfur in reference to a past of rabbit-fur clad stuffed bears; to read me fairytales until dawn; to find my laughing spot inside; to love me so largely and lavishly.

My heart is broken in every which way, shattered, jagged, jaunt. There are no words to describe the pain inside, amplified only by the raw eyes of my mother and sister. I need my father today, tomorrow. Always.

I need him now. The rough of his beard. The shine of his head. The shoulder that lent me so many nights of sleep. That heart that failed him but never, not in once in my 24 years of life, failed me.