#future appreciation

I turned it over. To: My daughter, Kara. From: Dad. It was the first time that he acknowledged that I was his daughter. It was the first time that I felt like it, since mom left.

Since then, I felt like his project.

Unlike other kids who enjoyed running around in their backyards I was inside. Inside memorizing the capitals of each and every state.  Instead of getting an ice cream sundae when I made the winning home run, my treat was to learn the capitals of about 200 countries and who resided over them in the past 50 years. 

I haven’t prayed since I was in high school. I don’t know if you’d even call them prayers at all—just these long strings of pleases that got lost in the corners of my bedroom ceiling. But I prayed for him, every day for 545 days. I don’t know who I was praying to—not any god he’d recognize, anyway, though I’d like to think we’re past that now. But who knows.

The day he left was the first time since I’d gone to college that he’d hugged me and it felt like goodbye. I don’t know why, but it reminded me of when we were kids playing in the snow at Grandpa’s. There was nothing more exciting than a white Christmas back then. We played football, all wrapped up till you couldn’t tell which one of us was which except for my pink ski jacket that I hated because I had a moral aversion to pink and it made me feel like being swallowed by a marshmallow. He was almost as tall as me then, but I wouldn’t have told him that under pain of torture—who wants to admit their little brother might be in any way better than them? I think he was twelve the first time he could tackle me. Really tackle, grab me around the shoulders and give me a face full of snow. We rolled over, laughing, both our faces a jigsaw puzzle of red and white. I remember wondering when my stupid little brother got so big.

That’s what it felt like, hugging him that day. Cold and warm at the same time, too much taller than me, bending down to give me the tightest hug I’ve gotten in my life.

I gave him my calendars, the ones I kept when he was gone, every day marked off with a thick stripe of sharpie. He traced the marks with his fingers, showing off the tan line his uniform had given him, just below the wrist.

I hadn’t seen him cry since he was eight.

He came up for Christmas this year. His hair had grown in, just barely starting to curl again. He showed me the new tattoo on his right arm, and I showed him the one I got on my left shoulder blade.

The snow had stopped by then.

I haven’t seen snow since the winter before I deployed, he said, that tone in his voice he never had before he left.

I said, Hey, wanna go throw the football around?

Yeah, he said, with a hint of that old smile.

The weather was blue the day the dead sorted you and the cannibals broke onto our street. The hill was red like your wings which were quite delicate sometimes. I feared I might crush them when I hugged you and they would bleed into my arms. You stood at the cusp of the small town and waved to me from a corn field, which was golden and the stalks were breakable like the wine glass I tipped. You were never angry with me, just the color maroon.  Sometimes the grass was never green but crumpled and the color of mushrooms, like hotel carpets and dorm capsules; it was always this way, like soul soup broth.  We were a red room. Once when we were much younger you leaned and whispered in my ear, What we are thankful for is not the future.  To not have future, or think of future.  I gave you a rose which was the kind of red they shower at princesses funerals.  The dead marched heavy that day and I stayed pressed to the pencil yellow pavement and waited for them to pass.  You told the dead they were the color black and so they shadowed into memories from which you were always running.