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.
