i’ve been surfing lately
i cant help it, i cant look at it
i can’t stop, there’s this and this and that
someone i pass by laughs, ‘you aint got time to lie’
and i surf and surf, mantra in my head, i aint got time
i aint got time to look under the surface, i know
it’s an angry mass of grief and gnarled fingers
weaving and knuckles pressing into each other
desperate for purchase, and it’s hundreds
of hands, right there, look, right there under the surface
but i aint got time, i’m surfing, i’m outta here

my love,

I was such an idiot. Standing at the altar, refusing to turn around. I must’ve looked so smug, but I wasn’t. I was excited, I didn’t want anything to go wrong, I didn’t want to jinx it. Wasn’t I not supposed to see you until the ceremony. But today was the ceremony, how dumb. But I was happy. This was really happening, the thing that I thought would never happen. The dream that woke me up in tears when I was thirteen: I couldn’t see her face, I couldn’t see her but she was in my arms and I was loved and in love, she was right there but I couldn’t see her. And here she was, walking up the aisle and I wouldn’t turn around. I was proud. Proud that I made it this far, that we made this real.

Isn’t this life insane? So many things we’ve been through. The faxes, the emails, the IRC chat rooms, scrambling around airports, walking through Paris, unimpressed with London, tight hotels, lazy motels, playing house in Albany, being bohemian, our little apartment which was bigger than we needed because spent all our time in the bedroom. Moving back to New York, trying to be adults, looking for a home to start a family, we had started a family, ioanna, then michael, the first flood, then the second, the parade of cars, the anger, the fights over money, the fear of something precious being lost, and yet, we go on, one off to the college, the next in the wings, but still you. Still the joy of you. The woman of my dreams who I couldn’t bear to see her face, who I couldn’t bear to see on our wedding day, who I cannot wait to return to.

There is nothing in this world that means to me more than you.

always,

me

Dear Baba,

Thank you. Thank you for all the times you listened and you had no idea what I was talking about and for the times that you did understand. Thank you for being patient with me when I was outrageously wrong and letting me make my own mistakes. Thank you for stopping me when I went too far. Thank you for laughing with me and thank you for getting angry when I’ve been taken advantage of. Thank you for disagreeing with me but supporting me nonetheless. Thank you for the advice I didn’t ask for but sorely needed to hear. Thank you for always keeping the door open and thank you for always picking up the phone. Nobody is a perfect father, but you come pretty damn close.

Love you.

my love,

I’ve written of you being a shore. I’ve written of the compassion with which you have woven our lives. I’ve written of bright memories with our children. Year after year, your vitality, your strength, the promise you have kept, the light in the dark, the warmth against the winter.

You would think it would get easier, you would think it’s a toy that we’ve assembled and turned the crank and we let out into the world and just watch them

She:
there’s beauty everywhere. or we splatter it on all we can see. we’re the ones that we capture it. take it all in and jumble it all in our bellies and make it beauty. were the only ones that can process it. we’re the ones creating it. oh how lovely it is to be under the spell of love. to hold it in my pouch and feel it in my elbows, wringing it day in day out. it’s the grease that keeps me moving. keeps as all moving. a tiny thing which isn’t actually very tiny at all. it’s the needle that weaves itself through us all, pinning us to the ground, tying us to the skies. it is a fragile, single thread, and yet we are still here anyway. i thought for the longest time love was weakness. but actually love is the strongest force. it has to be, without it, none of us would be here and everything would be apart. but that thin single thread, it is solid, it is strong. it cannot be created. it cannot be destroyed. all it does is transforms. through all its changes, it is still always love. it could never not tie us together.

I:
very reminiscent of “I know that love is the only thought and pain is the only feeling”

the question for me is, what is this love that we feel? it is not eros, it is not quite agape, it is not either of those things. so what binds us? what are we forgetting in our toils? what is the static that jars and unnerves us? i cannot say i love everyone, there is too much brutality, there is too much vying for the things that keep us alive. but i love the concept of everyone, i yearn for peace, i yearn for rest, for everyone to be at rest, to hold everyone and say, ‘you can rest now, i got you’

i’ve become hardened, i’ve become a machine, not all armor, perhaps an armadillo. and the word sounds funny and ridiculous because it ultimately it is. how ridiculous we all are, balled up in our hardened shells, careening off of one another

Always there, waiting, tugging, a constant threat, I bury it so deep and I think I am ok, I fool myself I am ok, I can tell myself I am ok and I am whole and I can stay steady, but it’s a sham, a lie, a palm obstructing the view of everything gyrating out of control on a wild axis and it mocks me, it says, ‘soon, soon this will all be mine and I will tear it asunder before your very eyes’

But someone else says, ‘this is what you signed up for’
They pick me up, ‘you cannot afford this’
They snarl, ‘snap the fuck out of it’

On Monday night she went offline. She told us it was only going to be a few hours. She told us she was going to be alright. She came back online three hours later. She said she was tired. She said she was going to tell us all about it.

In the early morning her girlfriend told us there were wounds on her wrists. She told us she hurt herself and was confused. We went into the city and surprised her. She had no intention of telling us anything. She looked completely normal. I confronted her: when are you going to tell us about your wrists?

She cried. We talked. I looked at her right wrist: cat scratches. But that’s with the left hand, the weaker one. I looked at the other. There, the first cut, or attempt. A little deeper. She was told to find a church. She was told she could save him if she prayed there. Alone all this time. Late evening. Dark streets. She made an offering with a found piece of glass. Or tried to.

She said she didn’t know what was real. She said she felt disillusioned. We took her home. She rested. She had to go back into the city the next day. On the surface, I couldn’t tell the difference. We talked. Her feelings, her realizations. I don’t know if her silence is disappointment or if she is still sorting it all out. If she is trying to reconnect. I joined a meeting through the phone, she did what she had to do, I was just around the corner. It was raining, we got some bagels. She was sweet and quiet like on all road trips. She was just as she ever was.

We return home, she focused on school work. She writes in her journal towards the end of the day. She rests her head and continues to write. Is this the cause, the sign I should looking for? Is my blessing her curse? The thing, this thing, that keeps me grounded, did it untether her? Did she make the mistake of trying to breach an impassible membrane when the beauty of this is that very barrier? That the point of writing is it’s inherent artifice and not the raw, unbearable truth?

The next day, Thursday, we go into the city together on the train, she has a midterm. I go into the office. Luckily we agreed we’ll come back home together. We keep in touch via text throughout the day. I worry but work, I pretend. I’m distracted, this is the last place I want to be. I put all this in a box. After a string of meetings and a presentation, I go outside, I peek, I hear the sound, the roar. I close the box before it breaks me.

Friday is the greatest challenge. She goes in alone and I can’t join her, I have to be there for him. I couldn’t choose, I have to believe she is strong, that this was a one time thing. I have to have faith in her. I have to show her I have faith in her. Waiting to leave she sees the tears on my face. She asks, why are you crying? I lie, am I? I leave her, I get home, I cannot bear it, I struggle to get into the rhythm of the work. We text throughout the morning. I go to him, we talk about his future. I am torn and have to forget, deny it all, deny the last three days. At some point she will need to cross Central Park for an appointment but tells me she dreads it. Thankfully, we got hit with a minor earthquake. It is all anyone talks about for the next hour. Her meeting goes hybrid. She says, Thank God. She comes home again.

After dinner she tells us she is still going to go on her trip to see the eclipse upstate. Measured, as if it was well thought out, definitive. Six hours away. I lose it. That right there, I tell her, tells me a lack of maturity in your thinking. She tells us she’ll be fine, she’ll be with friends, they’ll care for her, that this eclipse tha might never happen again, who knows if they’ll even know each other in the future. My mind reels, I push hard, but you’re ok with us being worried sick for eighteen hours, that’s worth it? She retorts, will you really be that worried all that time? I snap, when I came home today after I left you, I wept because for the first time in my life I had to choose between my two children, I couldn’t be in two places at once. I reminded her that she was not alone, we were always going to be there for her, but it also meant she had to consider the impact she has us, what her trip was going to do to us.

She relented. She went upstairs. I get scolded for being too rough but I don’t care. She and him are everything and if that means they leave this house hating me, but intact and strong and whole and safe, so be it. She comes back down, she hugs me. Everything is as it was.

Has she touched madness? Has she taken the first step down an easy staircase? Will it leave her alone, stop calling out to her? She was ready to not tell us anything, is she telling us everything now? When I look at her, what am I seeing? The beginning of something that will plague her life, hound her, keep her from living? Or is it a rite of passage that will be whispered about in the future and told to her children when it happens to them? I think of myself, the long road to get here, to some semblance of peace. And yet the days I feel the gristle of being alive and how there is never any rest. How everything vacillates between being unreal and surreal and I cannot be real. How it hinges on a piece of rust and the tension never, ever relents. How it’s all held together by sheer will.

I close my eyes and let the roar swallow me whole.

have to ruin things at the end…

do you not see how this ruins me? do you not see how this leaves me speechless and incapable? do you not see the corner you’ve backed me into? do you not see how cold the concrete of the floor is? do you not see how my face is pressed into the brick? do you not see how my arms are frayed and my tongue has turned to ash? do you not see how, each time you say this, i believe you? do you not see how each time you say this, i think of escape? do you not see, how each time you say this, i think to myself, he would’ve been better off if i was dead?

At your age, the nights were long and rash and jumbled, there were winters that were bitter and cold, quick and blindingly white. Summers that were sticky and sharp, airy and star filled. My friends were fleeting, mercurial, intense and complicated. I never knew where I stood with them and I was always a bit lost, looking for a lasting connection, a frequency I could never dial into.

 
 

At your age, I was locked in, tuned out, above it all but burdened. I was introspective and judgmental, angered but not yet enraged. I was past trying to impress anyone, but I knew I had a long way to go. I didn’t want to escape, I didn’t want to fit in, I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin. I was embarrassed by what I was and couldn’t figure out who I could be.

 
 

At your age, I had nothing figured out but thought I knew it all.

 
 

And I look you at your age and I can see the contours of what I was, I can see the thinking and the yearning and where the edges fit. I see the alignment and feel a measure of pride anticipation of what’s next. I see where you have surpassed me, how you have stretched the boundaries and leapt forward, unknown territory that I was never capable of, a strength that would come to me only much later.

 
 

I look at you at this age and I am giddy and afraid. You’ve set the bar so high that it makes me dizzy, and where I should be worried and afraid, I find myself saying, there’s even higher she can go.

It hits you all of a sudden after its planted its feet squarely in the back of your mind. You can’t say you didn’t see it coming because it was seething all along. Lying in wait. And you’re filled with regret, you miss them terribly. You miss them when they were two, when they were four, when you read to her and she didn’t understand the words or the pictures but she knew her father loved them. When you used to hold his tiny hand and you walked around the block and thought of important things to say that he would never remember. You push the thoughts away because right here right now you’re trying to sort out the back half of this life and it’s impossible. Because all of it is lost, the things you could’ve done more, the moment you turned away from them too quickly, the comfort you could’ve given. And although he’s turning into a better man than you ever were, although she’s more than you ever dreamt of, you miss them. Suddenly, deeply, harshly, just before passing out from the exhaustion of another day.