father love

Dad finally told me the truth that I knew somewhere inside. He told me that there are always stories to tell when there are people who need to know and be known and that he was a street kid in another life in Oregon. He wanted to tell me to stay out of the northwest—Eugene, Portland, they’re all the same—but he bit his tongue and let his fingers float over all his old bite marks. He told me I’m smart like him and between the lines we addressed something that’s never said but transiently true, that we are the same, me and him. Broken begets a little less broken, but it also means broken is afraid to break the delicate less broken. Come on now father, you gave me the transcendental south and told me to leave and steel myself for goneness. He taught me my name, he taught me my name. And yes, he also gave me a new one, I gave me a new one, but when you peel back the ovaries housing teeny tiny indeterminate ovaries you see everything is still there. It’s preserved; it’s pickled for the moment we become mortally salient and all the moments after when we realize its degrees of salience. He taught me my name so that I may be scared of old age and not death, become chaos-forward, and think maybe someday I could be the one, which is really the many.

“Funneled through him” is my resistance and my focal point, I chafe against the operative “Him” and become increasingly baffled by its superimposition onto my life. He asks, “can you tell me the universal truth?” and I say, “I’m not looking for that—I want to question what is true, I want to shake the basis of truth. But I’m afraid that won’t create something new.” He responds, “New isn’t an idea, it’s a framework, and it’s a reloving of the old”. I end it, “Well maybe new is the old recapitulated so fine that is grazes us with an intangible feeling that we call new”. We move on, and I remember that I love him and he I am the closest carbon copy of him in the world. He tells me about his duplex in Atlanta and his neighbor who made a million sacrifices to sit on his porch and write. He tells me the reason he and my mom are the only people left still loving each other is because of the million sacrifices they never talk about. “When the hard times come, never do something you can’t take back kid”.