'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.
