I am trying to remember these days. The past two weeks blend into few moments, not dim but dry eyed, wide eyed wonder and a type of tip-toeing I have never before practiced. When I close my eyes, I see straw. I see the hottest skies, wet mud, bruised eyebrows, plastic bottles and the sheen of chip bags inside out. Those were the only leaves flying in the winds.

Why there was no romance in those mountains. Beautiful, yes, but empty of promise, and empty of angels too. Places where coffee is grown but cannot be bought; a river runs through but cannot be fished; rains fall fast but can harvest no more than a single, pricey spice.

In this, my worries seem but small and somewhat solvable. All sprouting from too many choices, too many possibilities that compete in my head, my hands. It is not that I have chosen wrong in life, but simply that I have not chosen.

While, from afar, choices seem to pave roads or impede them, maybe--and I should know best--we cannot choose what is best or better. It is chosen for us in small salutes, never in promise but instead strong actions that lead to sounder sleep. Yes, to find somewhere a sweet, sweatless sleep is all to hope for, when biggest hopes cannot be fulfilled, but desire too cannot be buried. An inbetween of peace.

Bald, sugar

I know if you were here beside me, we'd drink coffee with bald sugar sticks at its bottom. Days would pass idly and sat by the sea. I would read my book in hammocks while you fried fish and laughed at skiddish iguanas jangled on a hot tin roof.

Waking in Guatemala, on my birthday is pleasant and coffee scented. At 5 AM I was ready to press a cup to my lips, to call back memories we had no chance to make. I want to see the mountains that you too ached to archive in your laminates and dream photography, no roses grown here but instead great, green wings. I want you to smile upon me, not only inside of me, to practice the words I am only now bringing to my lips.

Still, I believe (although I do not know what I believe) that you have brought me here. And I imagine it another way, where you spice empanadas and link my arm into your own. I am glad I am here, and glad I am here for you, as a part of you, because my own green wings are those of rolling Rs, planted, harvested by your devotion.

Caged birds

We arrived in Antigua to pastel houses in rows that opened--bright, voracious gardens I could not conquer with my camera lens, nor my eyes. It was exactly what I had imagined, an avid reader of Marquez's life, still sweet on the dreams my father described--rainbow hammocks and spiced chocolate; caged birds that neither slept nor sang.

I could see him there, in the mountains and muted colors that crept up, as remembering times I had not lived but, rather, heard. The smoke of the volcanoes both curled and calmed me, the high grown grass almost enough.

Just as in my city streets, those streets of jade could not assuage the yearning; not the velvety cocoa wrapped around tamarind; not the fireworks; not the burning skies.

Still, I am glad to have tasted the fried tacos of his past; I am glad to have walked along the streets he wished for me and wished to sit beside me. To have inherited his eye and heart for beauty, pretense of thick skin and taste for sour, for life's bittersweet stains.

Streams

We all grow old. In this process, we grow up and out, extend, reverse ourselves through the crepes of clouds and wet thickets of thunderstorms. A history seems fragile when it unveils our families: the futile, fertile mountains of life we have listlessly lain upon; what lovers these memories become, folded in their familiar skins upon our own, drained of all objectivity, a subject clawed both within and beyond our frames. The cities too grow with us, a gentle graying of time; bricks burn beside the urns of relatives, trees tricked by long winters, foreclosed upon by inhumane, human projects or whored out as flagrant firewood that burns our hands. It is here that I am tired out by roaring crowds; and also, where I have lost my father.

With this, without him, I have gained a grappling for those sullen skins of memory; sway back in skulls of branches, any urban alcove I can find, in bent gaze of both him and my mother—the strangest medley of illogical, musical chairs of kin. In this time, I run in circles, try to locate an opening, accompaniment of peace where I can scoot inside of: a game of duck duck goose of sorts, which may end breathless, but in laughter, or at the very least with his April sap—that runs through our skins, weeps through our veins. Without tickets sewn into our hides, without markings that make us known, we are built and milked by men and woman made by memory, made in, of maple and Mississippi running, made mad by America.

My father was born in Tennessee, but being doubly a doctor’s child, moved around the country in such short spurts he could only remember his childhood in scents, in tastes and sounds. What he remembered fully were early, aching instances and an onset of living in adolescence, when he was thrown inside of garbage cans on 96th street in New York City, initiated by ghoulish gang members who he at once practiced his art upon—that of laughter, that of tongue. My father was to become a psychiatrist, but did not know this at the time; in fact, he loathed the possibility of becoming like his own father, a fanatic with pen and paper, armed only with the flagrant words of Freud. In his rejection of this eventual redemption, of his long-chosen path, he wrote, he sang, he philosophized—and like all artists, holed up inside himself, reflected and rejected more human hideaways.

My father always turned to the seas and the seas alone, because there lay no voices; because the silence gave way to graves of life, to the very gravity of life that he felt far beneath his skin. He had grown up both tormented by and without parents. He had grown up alone but bothered by the loud dressing of perceptions, the prickly décor of his family’s fake and fading lifestyle, the folds of their fat lies. And so the sea lent him a baptismal state; a muscled means of being born again, without the racket that ruled his house, without the costuming he feared might devour him. With only his wooden fishing rod, and a blind white string that would tangle itself in the life of silence beneath the muddy wells of water; a boy’s back hot with sun.

Streams that gave not meat, but the opportunity to survive.

When we were beautiful

In the roads, like the songs, swords forgive me for spewing them forth, our words.

Still the memories might not entertain. So tight, so tired, at the tip of a tongue that could balance no more blows. It is autumn as autumn is, rainbow menagerie of leaves, grasses and glass moments, windows I banged against, breathed against, on which I wrote another name.

There is a Bon Jon Jovi concert coming up, entitled “when we were beautiful.” How fitting for these days, this road back (home?). I have engaged, upset the time to avoid the temptation of reaching out, touching my house. Still, it is autumn I recall. The sculpted grounds and walks in woods, front porches that could contain nothing, not the need, not the winds.

I did not know the guaze that would grow around autumn’s trees, trap and sadden them by my yellow barn. I did not know to cook, but heated jars and wet my soul with full grape wine. I did not know that one foot forward would take me far across oceans and age, would unleash me from my auburn jungle of limbs. I did not know those knives would look back, lurch back at me, burst forth from my wool cocoons to flutter their fanatical eyes.

Of that autumn, I remember the cold of metal pipes, voices clinking inside of their bones—how I held my ear even there to sight a single truth. How I pursued pinker lips; how the bathtub could not warm me. How wild the weeping was, that no wish could release me—or even jangle my chains.

The swords

Then the lips, the swords remind me of the pirate in our home. So too the market will mark me, candycane scents and the touch of apples on my tongue. Then too will the ice split open, spill forward a snowy night we could not make it back on open roads. I will press my face to the glass windowpane, pained, see the golden feet of fairytale furniture and lost speckled poneys with sad eyes. I will sit across from you when you mourn in the midnight street diner. I will mourn alone.

And there will be the fields, there will be the bluest walls of all, the cozy nook built by your hands. I will curl in the corner of the attic, push back at the boxes that stifle our tears. I will climb on top of the cabinet, curl my legs to my chest, sip the sour morning coffee and miss you, though beside you, all those days.

Before, I will rock myself to sleep on the wicker porch chair, turn my back to the gorges where grown and barefooted,you were lost. I will sip tea alone from a dark green gourd, will savor even every wind.

Maybe, at dusk, I will cross the feathery bridge, a small branch you hold to my knee. Or I will twist and turn in pine green sheets. I will sip the heart off a coffee cup, will saunter roads home. Two for one specials will catch my eye, sour skittles and cans of soda sipped dry, sat on their heads.

Navy hatchbacks will move inside of my breath. I will lock the door to my passenger seat, taste olives off of counters. Madeline will blink at me me, a stranger that haunts. I will hear his crackled voice on the radio and the chords will shock me; the hills will have grown around me, the mission's cupbards empty and hurting again.

I will edge towards wineries and raspy nights. I will write. I will tie my hair in curls and slip on white. No matter what, when I keep walking, I will turn my head around.

Still, I cannot imagine those white, chartered streets. I cannot remember even my last step, that swallowed goodbye. Only the trinkets that danced on our shelves, only the sunsets that slapped back at my regret.

Where the wild things are

I feel akin to the small boy with pointed-ear pajamas and an imagination that cannot be caught or cuddled, left extinguished or breathless by day. There is nowhere else to go, but where the wild things are: an internal, in-exterminable expression of world eventful and alien, where kisses are blown instead of noses in sleeves.

And so I put on my footies and run.

I play with nostalgia, link back to, lick back at it—promise of storks and white, white nights to ride home. I see those nights as waves, peaked, broken—imagine my lanky arms, drowned in a moonlight I could not love (or turn my back to in later stages of life).

I play in tidepools, soft and hot from sun; corner stores where I could huddle and hum a name; I play on subways, where I imagine an eventuality at KaDeWe, to step out at Alexanderplatz and stock up on krusties, black licorice, yearning that still chokes my soul. I rock in those raw and rickety arms, so sour and still so sweet to touch.

I play on swingsets, churning my insides and the inside outs I whispered, now locked tightly (without keyhole), a place even my child eyes cannot peak inside of: even my voice cannot reach to tell. So many syllables, sounds I cannot speak. Creased guitars, a piglet farm, coveralls and crudettes only touched to my lips.

So the past, played and pleated, is presented in grand gowns and big mistakes. Those mirrors, mildly tilted, both a maze and a storm: a kiss of salt, of the waves, of the wounds.

Miss

I miss the world I torched with my (magic?) wand, so many mountains I promised to lay myself down between, when the nights bit hard and the winters were shouldered by better men. Sometimes, I seek out reminders; as if I relish in the wrenching, fill my nights with foreign, forgotten words that have, in their heaviness, the nest they grow around me, a way to bring me home, again, ask back the memories I laid beside flowers and filled wounds.

I miss, strangely, glass cups I could balance on my knees. I miss the pale green track suit that helped me to modernize, to blend in with dark haired beauties and so many shields from the sun. I miss the roads, cherry treats, ventilated cars, a burgeoning build up life to be mine.

It is gone and yet, sometimes I lie down beside it. Sometimes I caress its cheek as if, kissed once, loved enough, it will wake from this long and painful sleep. Sometimes, I lie beside it because the sorrow--sedentary now in most days of life--wants to remind me of who I was, those many years of making me right. And sometimes, it is only really guilt, as I know the crumbs swept up forcefully were taught by the life I did not choose; I feel guilty for the quilt I laid in, almost wicked in my greed.

And then I think of another life left behind, how jealous I am of the red bricked roofs and other, spoiled girls, who write their names. How close I came, inscribing mine not in ink, but blood, patterned mornings when I blamed the woods, I begged the stream to cool me, quickly home.

laughter

For some reason, my head is full of bells. Bells of laughter, and Kim's head thrown back over the quote 'the times they are a changin.' Teaching high schoolers makes me think of those times. Jealous, almost, of the proud and passionate prose through which they live their lives. I know it's the laughter, the summer roof and chicken fries--the laughter most of all by which he would want to be remembered. And I know that no one will ever make me laugh like that again; what a gift those gutteral gasps were, artfully intertwined in every one of our days. What a gift, as his child, both small and grown, to be always loved and allowed to laugh so loud.

you know

[somewhere i have never travelled] by e e cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near


your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose


or if your wish be to close me,i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending

This Years Love

I like to slip inside of songs, mostly when I am tired, or when torrid memories make their way back, pinch me in my sleep, sudden reminders of love--as loss--a lurid, breathing babe left behind. Photographs of youth are scattered on my nightstand, memorable moves between schools and styles of life, these make me look up in the middle of the night, not away; they invite in all that I shift my gaze from, inevitable arches, powdered peaks I cannot reinvent with words. It is both pure and pathetic, but love stands there, in my past, in my present, in my future in all of its forms; what I want is not to embrace it, but to enter back blindly, born into feathered arms.

I sit here, supposed to be working, or writing yet another collection of annual reports that somehow justify funding my scattered academic pursuits. But all that this year presents to me is clouded, or clouds, themselves, real but untouchable; present but impossible to climb inside of, to understand pragmatically, to incorporate as mine. I sit here and I write in code because real words, real explications are ugly and blind. All simplicity forgets the most important facts--the beast of ambiguity having made a home beside me, worse yet inside of me, an unfriendly fiend I cannot remove from my life, my skin.

Time moves in a muddled, mysterious way, and yet I remain, rock within the rocks of days I have lost, days when I could fully lend my heart. The heat, today, is a spring I rarely laugh upon, a flowering that should cater me in winds. Still no dressing for the wettest wound of all, still no sun that could bear its shadow, or free its soul.

Of course I miss my father. Now the words do not come any more, but shocks of pain that wake me, midnight breathing when I tell myself he is present, when I beg for some kind of ghost. I want to believe that the wings breaking the wind, I want to believe that thunder and sudden rain are bred in his name. Worst of all, I continue making deals, not with devils or with god, but within myself; all that I am prepared to lose to see him close, to inhale my other world against his chest, all that I will sacrifice for one day, or hour, for five minutes to bite his smokey breath. Maybe this is what stands between me and return to my racket of emotion; maybe this is why the whole world seems shallow, mild and shaded, rather than wild and alive as it did before. Righteous in missing my father, I am selfish in missing myself.

All I want is to write, to write and ache, invent and love in a way that seems far past to me; half of me ripped from my clutching arms. If I could write; and if I could be--for more than a moment--certain, I think the nights would pass in slumber, my bed would empty of black ice.

flannel hands

It matters less that there is sorrow. More that these waves are felt, so many miles away. That the vibrance of sweated nights, generosity, the gentleness still shudders to the bone. I cannot help but picture wider, wide-eyed skies. I cannot help but slip inside of such small scenes. What I do know is my agile, insurmountable self is what stands between battered dreams, or jaws hung open by a time that ticked away unwarranted, unwanted, and yet still warm against my chest; dried through my heart. It is a time scented with both spice and human, flannel hands. And here, in covers and coats of downy dust upon my skin, I can close my eyes and build there the home already stomped upon by my feet, my fists inside: build that better, sensible self--a self I should admire but still shudder at, as I could never adore. And adoration is, still, the only cardboard box I have kept through the years, such love bent out of shape and shorn of all its gems.

Mortified snow

It is strange when simplicity steals you back. When impatience and improbability becomes fixed by a fate never signed up for, long spring snows that have broken our strides. Stranger even when I feel imbued with loves, a life not mine--want to stand knee deep in spiraled southern rivers, want to take my coffee black. As said by Pablo Neruda--'I watch my words from a long way off. They are more yours than mine.'

When forced to compromise certainties; comfort; cradles we thought would rock our worlds, then small compromise suddenly hangs no weight on our shoulders, our hearts at all. Then compromise becomes the norm, waiting not awash in gripping panics, but instead in the grips of suns or sudden, city stars. Those stars apart partake in our mourning for eventuality, not an organized but organic calm.

I know this pain, inside of, unmended by my own body, it can be no brail to read that other deeper, more damaging pain. At once I know I can not only survive but live within my aching bones; but still not him, without my blood. Not when fear so hard fought against feigned passing, yet dropped me in a jungle so full with foreign sounds. Even in this moment, with the possibility of postponement, with the possibility of missing out on the small joys I have struggled to keep closer to my chest--even in this moment I see only one failure in my life; and that is my failure to fight hard enough for, to keep my keeper safe.

Life does not reflect what we accomplish but what we accommodate, not how we kick to avoid drowning but how we bend around all circumstance; how we return even when--always when-- we know no way to tread softly home to a fallen, mortified snow.

Putting on Airs

The streets of this city are tough, if tired: churned by childlike appearance, the apprehension of biting storms. I will drop these gentle winds if to be caught in the fanged airs of unearthly escapes; I will drop these gentle winds and run.

Where else do you find the minotaur, windswept and inhuman—miniature if androgynous gentiles of youth—but between the airs, and the eyes, united in the burning brow of memory, mistaken magic, or mighty mistakes? I can look up, out and above these pigeon-grey of skies. Yet what has kept me wild is not insincere, nor cynicism, but bruised belongings; the same belonging that nips in longing and layers beneath my skin. The belonging that brings me back to an artful, uphill climb raw of reason, powdery grass that grew more potent promises to let die.

Why, then, am I gasping, grasping for a breath beneath the yards of fabric that fall, fly around me, feign billowy softness I once believed all cities, pigeons, incensed doves possessed? I remain agile and exhausted in these silken jaws or dreams, in the smart swell of my jaundiced past.

When the blood, or breathe, stops streaming, so too the tears, so too the storms. What I wait within is neither ice nor warm, needed nor disposable, not mine but all that I can grasp back from the past, can give again.

Wardrobes

The venom is in the closet, where I tuck my head in the day, praying for a door to Narnia. What is noxious is the emptiness, the broad belly in which I can no longer close myself. And when I close the door, the simple white, a reflection of me and me alone. I believe it is there in the wardrobe, no land of lions but one of less fickle fairies that can dutifully dust alive.

When I sit and sweat below the earth's surface, drink wine in the revelry that I should embrace, I stand outside of myself; I shoulder the warmth of the evening, I whisper in the face of the girl I know best. It is not that I believe--there is a very obvious sentiment in the name of Never never land; it is just that while there is very much beauty in possibility, there is ecstasy only in what cannot be, breed, breathe. Impossibility is artful, an aged fountain we drown searching for.

So too can I drown my days when I watch the wardrobe, push up against the cement of walls that I hope will fall beneath my fingers, melting Dali clocks weeping on my hands. So too can I hope that whatever is in the wardobe, or in the skies, does not live only within me--that dollhouse version is too small to embrace. And that is all I am looking for in a sea of clothes, striped silk and always argyle. I am looking for his mane, peppered beard; the man more than the spirit that I have been promised will remain.

Tides

It is harder to wake from memory than dreams. Some mornings sweated with a mourning for not another try but tide; the most blushing of happiness still biting with bided time. Perhaps where we find forgiveness, we release the most; we forget what it is to abstain--haphazardly whole for few moments before we restore our reprieve. It is golden, gripped by sunshine and shadows I can laugh back at, sear in the sun. But still tempted, still fat with hand-in-hand hollows; with the breathe of coffee; with strung, spandex above my ankles, with the the bellow of Stand Up America, a moon-shaped mirror of my adolescent self.

I do not even try to quell the wisps of time that extend their branches, their spearing, spoken quills into this present that is only mine. Instead, I fully embrace the foreign, human fact, that time is not linear--or rather, not unilinear. It is a space and spade of many lines, woven in wool across our eyes, bound or blinded on our wrists, velveteen, soft, sweated silk, metal shards and shapes that pierce us, that remain.

Even when we try to fish them out, to clear or clean, divulge the present or any presence that unsettles our calm, of any glance back into that glinting night of blackened sealife and the bluest forgiveness of my father's eyes. The scent of the floors, where my body could not breathe out my beating heart; blood and boredom; the pools of sunsets that once flooded my eyes.

To smile, in reference to this past, is to know not that I am unchanged; but rather, that my core is so recognizable, still so soft, perhaps shelled--at times--in a generous cynacism, but uncloaked from the red, from the blood, from the hood, still waiting; waiting with an edge, with an expectation that did not, in fact, drown in those biting tides.

Kalaidescope

I want to isolate in these rare artistic moments, fraught with feeling, a foreign vanishing, grown of wishes and my own great expectations. As summer creeps open, vigilant and viceral, the world outside seems to mirror my insides: icy, blooming and blushing, groomed only by the gods.

For all of the mistakes, misuses, abuses, moments broken by wishes at our feet--spilled like bloody wines on cotton whites--for all of these real broken hearts lie sly certainties, birds with bated breath, slightly soured by the whole fishes gutted before their graves.

My world, my inside world remains soft and plush, as pathetically protective as a spotted tortoise shell, familiar as the slate grey pigeon that carried my initial love--overbred and full of promise, unique as the red-sand desert, filled with rodents somehow deserving of sun's nurturing eye.

Sometimes, many times, I want other things to matter most. I want to revel in the wash of hot water, be pleased by the rare if perfect sky. To sigh at the inhale of bakeries and weep in moonless nights. The small, not of my back, but of my own knowns, is that every rain of laughter is colored if not brewed by love; every tear shed is empowered by love. Why it has become both my house and my martyr, sacrificed by some sick strength of my heart. I am certainly discerned now from my lover--no longer are my cheeks wet with someone else's tears, my rage our offspring (virulent, violent and somehow still wonderful). Yet when I close my eyes I reinvent memory, or reignite its slight flames--a playback of familiar films, kailadescope versions of life that dance on my pupils, soft lenses baked to the core. Sometimes they are spinning, set to pounce, and other times as dumb as deer, greeting demise; or a child on the brink of opening the world, without the bulging chocolate of bunnies to tickle the armpits of the real, raw, sticky alive.

Sometimes I can stare back at myself with an open yawning of callused hands, milky bath water, sandpaper stubble and the disappearance of dunes.

Dunes of course are the high build up of sand, washed up barriers performed naturally and crushed only by children with vengeful tools. They are the real glass walls, set aside any ocean--the perching ground for parasitic birds, opaque, ovaler, wedded to water. They are barricades, barriers not only to the waves but also the lax lull of storms, the thickest silence of us all. To write about love, to live next to love in this sense is a velvety dawn, smoothed of a smothering landscape, disengagement, grown-up stomping out and down: not short of sand castles and buried feet. It is a devouring of the dunes, spilling forth, damaging of all the dams built between. And in this gnawing of the gates, not golden but skeletal and washed out by times in the sun, secret gardens bloom bent and born again--a gilded age of innocence, never wiped away but whispered through our crackled lips.

Love of words

Of course old men in pubs throw snow at girls who dare the streets. It is obvious and yet I am still oblivious to this very British life, lifted up above a past as short as my own, my nation, my city of god. They could be angels, these frozen fairies broken at my feet, or strings of cotton awaiting warranted spring. It is here I would expect them to write, a rare if real creativity cordoned off by ice queens and quick outpourings of skies, not love that lasts. But yet I think of poets that belong to my city and my own song. I think of stories not of pebbled pretense, not of Portuguese winds or those winding roads in which I saw desire, but of the very south of home, of the wildest buildings grown pale by the sea.

Perhaps writers are simply snared by words, themselves; they love rhetoric more than the real, soft, feathery beings that can keep them warm. They are cold perhaps, snowed in by wounded, wound up minds that never stop, the trails of tick-tocking, internal clocks that shudder even in the full mooned nights. Perhaps these snows, or these failures to warm the ice are real stakes that bend in hearts; they are the stakes they hold, such flippant hands in life, all aces or nothing, at its very, beaten best. All wings tucked into the crevices of breasts.

Vampires then, I find in writers, as I find in dreams. They have sucked in the life from others' lives, from lived experiences claimed in desperate prose. All stories told are real, not white lies but black realities. real as that fleeting cotton that will melt in moments at my toes, real as that ornate aching of every, any broken heart inside the darkness of these english pubs.

Words, as snow that does not belong on this forgotten island, as deep and damaged as the pebbles that grew our greatest poets--drowned inside of themeslves by active, enemy skies. Set to lurk, set to flight, their phantom fangs never abandoned, for no saunter, no skin can live up to a love of words.

What dreams

A patient of my father writes 'Any man who knows enough about figure drawing, germanium vs. silicon transistors, photography, "taking the air," farm-life, nightlife, Mexico, Lucky Strikes, cellphones, and making me feel half normal deserves to live forever.' I wake up in the middle of the night from a dream in which I am not asking my father not to die, but am asking him for a warning, something slower that will seep in over time. I feel guilty for this dream, where I want his death to develop like tea, a timed occurence, one with warning but still blackness at the end; death has become inevitable and instead of attempting to step up, to stand against it, I try to postpone it, to let love live a little longer.

Somewhere in my mind is a dance. Or rather, a song, 'Stay, just a little bit longer.' And for some reason, in these lyrics, I see my very best friend, I see car rides struck with the tears of the skies, rains to which we belted old melodies; I see a wedding where we danced in circles with a dark-haired, older man. I see walks down Riverside drive, measurements of the new distances between us. No longer do I feel afraid of age, of developing, losing, changing over time. I am, however, terrified of sudden loss-of the wrenching numbness, the outgrowth into pain, the raging anger of my very own storms. I am most afraid of the weeping at the end--the portly nature of a pain that will not subside, so raw that it invades the nights, so real that it shatters smiles into frowns.

This is often how too it is with men, though there is no comparison to what I feel for my father. I am not writing here of the present, but in a note to a friend I emphasized the eventuality of hurt from separation, as she has recently split with her lover. Pain may be postponed, but it will show its face, whether by peaking from underneath hot covers at night, or by just full force, a skeleton from an unlocked closet, or a living being frustrated by the mundane passing of time. I am good at ignoring such pain--or rather, letting it in little by little, droplets that can not make me drown.

With my father, however, it is a wash, a shower, a bath of pain. Some days, it is deeper, I cannot move beyond 86th street and the roads it has built in my mind. I feel ill recalling the emptying of his office, or I enter his closet realizing how sentless it has become, or I empty my bags to find what I saved (a piece of a shirt, a small photograph) to be lost.

Although for the first time, I do not hold onto things so fully. Meaning, I have given up believing in such magical ways. Whether I hoard his argyle or not, he is gone. Whether I surround myself with questions of creation, he is gone

Deserving is certainly not enough to entertain reality; to assuage the airlessness that ate him up. Dancing is certainly not enough to alleviate inside aches, but still memories act like melted snow on my my lips, spun sugar that counteracts this sour--not the shuddering sour of citrus delight-but that which rests within the bittering part of the tongue.

I am thankful for the dreams where I hear his voice, even in the hours we so less treasure. I am thankful for the moments when I wake up warm from a love, just a little bit longer, all mine.