(no subject)
I used to wake up on Saturday mornings with classic rock coming through my windows. My mother would raise the blinds and I would open my eyes and stare at my ceiling of plastic glow in the dark stars that my father painstakingly applied one by one just to give his daughter the night sky. I would look out the backyard window and see my father working on one of his motorcycles with our two huskies by his side. The speakers that came from his garage always playing a song from his youth. Depending on just how late I woke up on these mornings there might already be meat on the barbeque. It was one of the most wonderful times of my life. Right after he died I could only remember the bad. I drank alone for two years after that. Not having that which had made me whole had choked my heart away. Before he died I needed more narrative space to extend myself into, I’d needed more lives. Afterward we had to live inside a void that could be filled only by his presence. His permanent absence was now an organ in our bodies whose sole function was a continuous secretion of sorrow. And yet even at this moment of ultimate loss, storytelling holds fast. As long as I try to imagine his life, his spirit, we are all connected. His birthday was yesterday. He would have been 56.