A Ghost At the Back of Your Closet

Christmas is back in its rightful place.

There's snow on the ground in Richmond, Rashka is sleeping next to me, and I am not too many thousands of miles away delivering the kin of strangers.

It is everything I would have given for last year as I sat and cried into my evangelical Christmas dinner.

And yet, something is missing.

I feel it deep down, almost as if my soul is patting its pockets to make sure it didn't leave anything at home. Perhaps its the lack of awkward phone calls from my father. Perhaps its the conscious decision to delete Lovely coming back to bite me.

If my dreams recently have been telling enough, perhaps it both.

Lovely crept into my sleep last night, showed up as my memory of him. I spent most of the day settled in my mind, until I realized that I had simply dreamed it. Even when I delete that old neighbor from everything I can touch, he is still tangled up somewhere in the frontal lobe.

Whatever the reason, the presents are wrapped, the tree is up, and I have six hours to figure out how to feel that genuine sigh I used to get when I was little and I would wake up and it was exactly the right day.

I can't miss two Christmas mornings in a row.

Perhaps waking up in a foreign bed amongst strangers was the wall between childhood and everything else.

At least I still have Rashka and the snow.

You Or Your Memory

My subconscious and I are currently at odds, and it has won this round as I am afraid to fall back to dreams for fear existence will cease.

I had just come home, but instead of following normal streets, I drove to my grandparents.

I walked in alone and stood in the dining room, wondering why no one was here for the meal set out.

And I heard the car drive up, and walked to the window, and peered out of curtains older than two generations.

And there was my father.

Here's where my subconscious slighty shifts reality, as I calmly walked out and hugged him.

I felt myself remembering how long it has already been. And then I asked. "Why aren't you dead?"

He turns to me and says "I have been quietly driving around drunk for a very long time."

And suddenly others pull up and set out food outside. And suddenly its night. And suddenly my father is sitting on the grass as if it were just another dream.

I walked up to him, towered over his shell, informed him that he had faked his death.

He informed me that he had faked his death. He reached for me, to hug me again. But I felt my body and my anger walking away.

The thought that I could see him again after all of that mourning made me hate him. I had done my grieving, I deserved to never see him again. I opened the car door, let out sparks and yellow jackets. I started to drive, and woke up in my bed in Massachusetts, almost relieved that he was dead.

I have not dreamed about my father since he stopped leaving quiet voicemails for me on otherwise loud nights.

It scares me that my subconscious has been holding him from me. It worries me that I walked away and did not hug him goodbye for the final time. It kills me that I will always feel tricked by some existential slight at hand, never to know all of the truth.

To think I had assumed that tonight would only bring works cited, physiology reading, and just a pinch of loneliness.

I guess those are the nights you really have to worry about.

I forget December's uncanny ability to bring out the ghosts.

Send It Out To Sea

I will never understand it, but I think it has something to do with Virginia and the grass filled cost that comes with investing in a snowman.

Once a year, I wake up to the usual last part of the exhale that is December.

and the snow has come for me.

All of these moments are connected. This year I am pulled back to dirt under my fingernails from holding on to what I knew.

Time on that day kept stepping on my toes, whispering in my ear to remember all of it, because it would never be the same again.

At the end of this year, I am going to throw away my map of roads that lead nowhere.

Roads to New Hampshire. Roads to that reincarnation of my father's attention staring across the room. Roads that sigh in the morning to make up for the lack of dual breath.

Here is where today brings me peace.

Here is where I have come full circle, and my phone is off, and my room is filled with the sound of snow and nothing else.

And here is where I am happy with this.

I worry sometimes that I have forgotten some of the moments in my life that brought me this feeling.

But then the sound of white comes along, and it's all still there.

No matter if the roads no longer are.

Your Name is Bob, You Smoke A Pipe

Sometimes I wonder if I am addicted to addicts.

It's getting cold again. My room faces the field and some mornings I wake up to frosted kale and can't remember my own name.

All in all, I am doing okay.

My friends here gently suggest some couch time now and again, but they don't see the beauty of driving around when a song named after my bloodline comes on.

Grief to me comes in quiet waves. Some days Bob is simply a syllable, other days it's the voice on the other side of the phone that I will never hear again.

I have formed an unfortunate habit in my life that is just coming to light as the stones quietly multiply.

I have yet to go see my father's grave.

I could cover this simple fact up with my belief in there being nothing under that grass but earth.

However, the extra miles on my car that are mysteriously absent seem to think differently. It has manifested itself in a little girl homesickness that I seem to have developed. Three months is a fascinating period of time to change everything or absolutely nothing at all.

In between the waves, I get occasional feelings of solace. When I was 14 years old, I had a forgotten day where nothing fascinating happened other than it was winter, and there was snow, and Rashka and I went for a walk.

I will always remember that moment for the clarity the menial brought me. I tried so hard to remember every step so when I was old and my energy was about to leave me, I would still feel the cold air and my young veins and the beauty of not knowing things yet.

That memory keeps coming up for me, and I realise perhaps I didn't save it for the wrinkled face of my old self. I saved it for when things weren't so much ordinary as just shit.

It amazes me sometimes how I left little time capsules along the way.

My father was an orchid child, my mother from the dandelions, and I, in an orchid way, planted a some very dandelion seeds.

and I have both of them to thank for that.

Especially when it comes time to remember my name.

All That You Can Do

Perhaps loneliness is simply going to be the way it will always be.

It has been exactly six months since Lovely kissed my shattered forehead on his front steps, and I walked away towards my side of the blue.

I am almost the age where they will let me buy my fathers poison.

I have known that which drove me to myself just shy of 8 years now.

And, though it will never be the last time I say it,

I don't know if I feel it anymore.

I think of Lovely and try to pull up every glance (s)he ever gave me, and I feel a stronger pull towards what exists in my life currently, as porous as that is. I think that with the events that moved the earth out from under me, I am tired of ghosts.

I'm tired of having too much to say to nothing at all.

And yet the loneliness stays. I wake up in the mornings sometimes and think I can hear someone else's chest rise and fall. Then I realize its just the cold fall air beating at the windowpane.

I suppose we do what we have to do.

I suppose that's all that you can do.

Now That I Know

After everything was said and done, I closed the boxes, found my keys, and came home.

And healed as much as you can when you are missing an arm.

This summer filled up with patients, stethoscopes, and Rashka's greying beard.

I'm back in the north again.

Yesterday I followed the beaten path towards the driver's seat and drove north, to a little theater in the middle of beautifully nowhere.

On the drive, I started to realize the peace that has been growing from the scars.

Peace to me is being the first to wake up in a house full of New England age and standing in the kitchen listening to the floorboards rub their aching joints in a cold weather sound so quiet it's deafening.

Peace to me is hearing the female in Lovely's voice rust away one more link in our chain.

Peace is finally seeing the color wheel in the mountains.

And enjoying the road because it means not having to do anything in the space between surviving.

Peace is hearing a friend understand the same kind of unearthly realism.

Peace is watching a man blush with joy when he sees that the dough he set out has finally risen.

Peace is everything and all and moving forward and letting the dirt settle and give life from the grave between it.

I have taken a step forward from my ragged shuffle backwards.

All I need is one more.

And peace is waiting.

Souvenirs

The death of a parent creates something that slowly creeps in just as you are beginning to sleep away the pain of freshly dug earth.

And that is fear.

Every time my mother leaves the house, I panic just quietly enough for Rashka to glance up at me, and no one else.

This morning she hit her head and told me goodnight before leaving. I drove to work with my hand clenched on my forehead.

There will be two phases in my life. One with my mother, and one without.

I am dealing with the silent phone of my father. I am too young to have both of my connections to the earth stop calling.

So I have come home for the summer. And for the first time in years, I relish the ability to not be completely on my own.

Sometimes at night though, my brain flutters like it did when I spent the night unexpectedly at my grandparents, and the dusty toys hanging up in the shower gently reminded me to enjoy my final evening.

Tracing patterns in the dust of childhood gives me a fleeting contentment I will never forget, and makes me wonder if this fear is simply my body trying to memorize.

Fly Away On a Hummingbird

I guess it's time for me to tell it.

Friday was a snapshot of priorities. A friend's birthday, I make my way over to my phone through laughing bodies, and there are people who have been there.

Specifically, my mother.

I knew what she had to tell me before I put the phone to my ear.

What I did not know, however, was how human I could be.

I felt my knees on the ground, and what came out of my mouth was a wail that could have frozen half the heritage of anyone's blood.

My father laid down on his couch with the heat up high on Friday afternoon, turned on the tv, scratched Sally between the ears, and left this world.

The drink beat the reds.

When I was little and could not sleep, I would pull out a picture of my father in a teal kiss the cook apron and try to make myself feel what I would when he died.

I never knew why a child before the age of cursive knowledge would do such a thing, but I think I do now.

I worshiped him. However, something in my bones always gradually tucks religion away as a storybook.

I was learning to mourn him before I didn't remember how to love him how he was.

I hoped for my father, but I cannot forget that he was Samson between pillars.

Yesterday I lost my mind and became that little girl again, and ran to Lovely.

But today, there is a reverence for the pain I could imagine years and years ago, when I was convinced the man only drank Coca-Cola, and cigarettes were beautiful boxes I got to play against the side of the truck.

His blood stills runs through my veins regardless of what form his life exists.

And I do miss you, Dad.

Cat's Cradle

My father is about to die from living too hard.

Saturday was his birthday, and seeing as how I had come full circle home, I went out for lunch with him and his president of the world sibling.

My father has become a child.

His eyes are full of water that has stood still too long. Sentences slip over his fingerprints, and as he put it after eyes from his sister, his liver is shot.

It was then calmly explained to me that my father had been living unbeknownst in filth and unemployment and bottles and they had only found out because his blood had decided to explore parts of his body it did not belong in.

Oh, and Hepatitis C.

My father has poison for blood.

We then went shopping for new flooring in an attempt to clean up what he had forgotten to do to his home. Except I was asked to make the decisions, because it is to be my house soon.

My father is about to go out into everything.

And I am ready to let him.

The Magi asked me during a first sleepless night of learning each other what my deepest secret was.

I told him that I would not be sad when my father dies. I know I ruined it with that boy, but I will appreciate that he let me give the tip of my tongue that came crashing back when I was asked, a few weeks later, for a tip of my liver.

It's not hate. It's not revenge, or apathy, or anger.

I am tired. And life will be so much better for that man when he no longer has it.

My father is going to lose big.

I never expected anything else.

Don't Be a Stranger to Yourself

The lovers revolve, but the picture is always the same.

It's usually blurry from my love of hiding from lights.

I'm never actually looking at the photo. But whichever fascination has decided to capture me, they usually get it.

Genuinely happy. It's a smile that used to be reserved only for the moment in question.

But recently, they have been shedding some light on it.

I never know it's happening. I will be pressing buttons late at night, and come across that moment, now pixelated and glad I was the only one in the room.

And tonight, as I stumble over the most recent evening of a self inflicted silent phone, I have found another.

It could make me sad. It could remind me of how I have run.

Instead, it reminds me that sometimes, in the early dawn or late afternoon, when I have reclaimed an old plaid shirt and given up on everything else,

I have made these moments, and

I really am happy.