Ba,

There is so much I have come to appreciate about you over the years, there is so much I am embarrassed of.

How do you did do it? How did you not just put me in my place when I was so sure, so arrogant, so clearly stupid? How did you keep a straight face when I thought I knew anything about anything. I remember, I remember trying to tell how life was, what I knew about it. I wish I could laugh about it now, but instead I cringe. Instead, I try now to be more humble. I look at my kids and sometimes, not as often as when I was there age, I see it. I see the same pompousness and I wonder: is this what you saw? And like you then, I do not mock them, do not put them in their place. I think to myself, oh man, I hope they get it later on. I listen, I give advice, I let them breathe, I let them get there on their own without them crashing into the rails.

So thank you Ba, thank you for putting up with my stupidity and my confusion. Thank you for putting up with my laziness and my worries. Thank you for tugging me gently from the edge and for pushing me towards the road. The older I get, the more I’ve come to appreciate you and the stronger your voice in my head becomes.

Keep talking to me Ba, even when I don’t show it, I am still listening.

I tell the little one, who is little no longer, “there is the ‘quiet’ and there is the ‘roar’, and in between is the living”

I gesture with my hands, I struggle with the words, because it’s just coming to me, this is what I’ve been feeling for so long, in that moment of telling her, the longing for the quiet, the staving off of the roar and the fourth thing, the thing I cannot bear, the thing I cannot face, but I do not tell her that, I do not dare: the end of all things, the inevitable, the inescapable, what underpins the preciousness of time, the forward momentum of each echo.

You want to write your way out of this and it’s impossible, you don’t have words for it, you don’t know how, you’re ill equipped. Let’s set aside that perhaps you are the cause of it. that it is all your fault because of everything you prided yourself on. You called it hubris. Indeed. You missed the signals, the warnings, ‘she doesn’t engage with the other children, she plays by herself’ and you wrote it off as her being shy, she’s just shy, we have history of that. You who was sat on the floor in kindergarten because you couldn’t shut up in class. You who always yearned to connect because you had no brothers, no sisters, no father. You didn’t have history of that, if anything it’s another addiction that you’ve tried to shed, another bad habit you try to avoid.

And you hear her weep and you wonder what pain you ignored in her short life, you think of that song, “the dreaming tree” and at some point, you won’t be able to protect her, at some point you will be in the ground with the dirt and the maggots and the worms. Or dust, or ash. Either way, you will be dead and will she suffer? You hound yourself, will she suffer? If there ever a time to believe in God and the afterlife, it is now and I cannot bring myself to it.

Between the quiet and the roar, there is the living and the absolutely certainty of the end

my love,

All things come from you. Through you, we have two wonderful and amazing children. Through you, we have learned to be caring and kind. Through you, we have learned selflessness and perseverance. This life, this ridiculous, little life of ours, full of laughter and seriousness, full of worry and seriousness, full of silliness and honesty. Every day I witness some nuance of how to be better, to be a better father, to be more than I ever thought I would be. So thank you. Thank you for being strong for them when I was weak, for being the soft hand when I only knew how to be the stern voice, for holding all of us together when we were tired and falling apart.

love, always
me

“If you hold a gun and I hold a gun, we can talk about the law.

If you hold a knife and I hold a knife, we can talk about rules.

If you come empty handed and I come empty handed, we can talk about reason.

But if you have a gun and I only have a knife, then the truth lies in your hands.

If you have a gun and I have nothing, what you hold isn’t just a weapon, it’s my life.

The concepts of laws, rules and morality only hold meaning when they are based on equality…”

-Anonymous

at some point, enough is enough
and the goodbyes need to be said, the recriminations
displayed, maybe
not for all to see but to be laid out, this is why
i was aggrieved and this is why you were
not enough, to blow out the cobwebs
that have become thorns, to wrestle
past regret and animus and
resentment. while he was never one
for poetry, he was for words
laying out treatises and guides and paths for others to follow

i will miss him, if only there will be one less person
to share my rage with

how i long for the quiet, to be without a voice, to be here without being seen, without wanting to be seen, to be devoid of desire, to be voiceless, thoughtless, to only be the movement and the seeing and the hearing, to move through the world and have it wash over me, through me, as if i was the wind and leave no mark in it. to no longer hurt, or think about the hurt, or the hurt i’ve let left on everyone. i am tired of being the disappointment, i am tired of being disappointed, i am tried of feeling i’ve said too much, i’ve said too little, i should’ve said something, i should’ve said nothing at all. after this long road i’ve arrived at a place i never intended. i didn’t want to be this way. i just wanted to be near you, i wanted to watch you all. i wanted to hold you and laugh with you and cry with you. but instead this noise, this act, this spewing of bullshit that traps me into a configuration. into artifice.

i just want the quiet. i just want to be quiet.

my ioanna,

dream child, sprite who twirled around our living room, quiet and pensive by the windowsill, grown into an urban hippy overflowing with a deep connection to the world that seems to shun her. Over and over, ‘I dreamt you’ what a thing to say to a child, the expectation, the hope, the confusion, what was I in this dream of yours? Do I measure up? Can I live in that dream, is it as harsh as the real one?

dream child, every hope before you, some yours but mostly made up of everybody else’s. is it hard on you, the anticipation of the false move? The meaning to say not quite aligning with the thing that was said. Is there remorse? Oh, my darling daughter, to already have remorse, what a terrible thing. It hurts when I think of it, I want to take it all away, the thorns hidden beneath the roses, the disappointment, the awkward pause that isolates you and drives you deeper into your mind

dream child, you always came to me. I remember. Sitting outside, smoking, you joined me on the porch, some chatter, some nonsense but a quiet settling, watching the world go by. Early mornings when you came down to the basement where I slept from a night’s worth of work in the dark. I could hear your bated breath, the glee, the anticipation, should I wake him? I don’t want to wake him. I should wake him. I could literally hear it.

dream child, I lied to you. You are nothing like I dreamt of. The dream was an idea, a figment of a desire to protect something precious, some manifestation of the love I share with you mother. But you are so much more. There are figures of art that when you look at them, they make your soul sing, they make your soul weep. Like looking at the sky when away from the city, an infinite darkness with a million pinpoints of something terrifyingly far and away.

And that is what I feel when I now look at you. An infinite sky, something beautiful and endless, but instead of silence, instead of an immutable distance, there is a voice that calls to me, that always beckons for me to join her, to join the pure wonder of who you are and becoming.

love, always,
me

most of the time, in my dreams, i am resigned to all the horror and sadness. i’ve seen loved ones die. i’ve had teeth explode out of my mouth. i’ve seen you and them all leave me over and over, angry with me, overjoyed, not thinking of me at all. and each time, i am unaffected, an odd observer to my own life. it is what it is. it was always meant to be this way. null and void to the core.

today, this morning, in the midst of such a dream, of our mortality, i couldn’t stop weeping, sobbing, i was inconsolable, i couldn’t be held, balled up into myself, heaving, overwhelmed.

and i woke up.

not a tear, just an immense emptiness. the memory of the dream so vivid but not one tear on my face. i felt nothing, passionless, weightless, i was nothing. where did it come from?

more importantly, where did it all go?

my love,

it’s been all amuck. i’ve been all amuck. we’ve built a foundation that has begun to take root. i see a path out of the woods, i see the shore. i see the waves breaking against the jetty, i hear the promise of an end in the tide. i see the seagulls coasting the sky like kites waiting for me to take hold.

and as we approach, the soil turns sandy and our feet slip, footfalls momentarily stuck and slide. and this is where we are at, so close but it feels infinitely harder. this is the shortest stretch but the most arduous.

and of all the things i promised you in this love-life of ours, this is the one dream i have my sights on, the one thing that all this effort has been geared towards. and it’s crystalizing before us, it’s as clear as the horizon in the distance and the sea that kisses it with the sun.

will you join me my love? will you dance with me through this hurdle of dunes and petrified wood? will you sit with me in the sand and let the breeze play with your hair? will you laugh with me as we remember when our children were scouting for seashells? will you hold my hand as we watch the sunset before the moon enshrouds us all?

it’s just a little bit further. it’s right there, past the muck.

i can taste it.

love, always
me

the machine moves, it has momentum. the only friction, could i have done more? it is never enough, it never ends. yes, it becomes background noise, the taunts of incompleteness, of being broken, a hobble of a man, no, not a man. there is nothing gendered about this, strictly shuffling, before the designation, before the naming, it happened all before you were even named: a still birth that crawls about and pushes on, scarred and scarring, unforgiving in your pursuit, unforgiven for what you have done