believe in your own myth

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i know it’s silly to fear something as certain as death.

in the end, no one will ever escape it, so,

what’s the point?

i guess, maybe, the point is i don’t really fear death, but loss

and death is the only loss you cannot hope someday comes back to you.

i guess this is why people believe in the afterlife. heaven. ghosts. reincarnation. 

we are desperate for a way to undo what can’t be undone, to find a way to bring back things that have been lost to us. 

maybe death is just a place where lost things go.

maybe the silver ring i could never find is just as dead as my grandmother, as my father, as my mother’s best friend.

maybe heaven is a place for things that can’t ever go home again.  a dog that ran away. a father who left. a teddy bear, dropped unseen during a family vacation.

maybe the afterlife is full of lost loves and left socks. 

maybe dying is just a cardboard box labelled lost and found

i am so blessed that my last memories with you are happy ones. 

i don’t know why this memory always stands out to me, but when i miss you i think of you, me, and mom in that mcdonalds in monterey in the middle of the night. you wanted french fries, so we went in after spending a day in town, and actually sat down and ate in the restaurant. i had fries, and vanilla soft serve, and a coke. and we sat in that mcdonalds, talking and laughing, and it was the summer my dad moved out, and everything felt so light. 

that same trip, we went to asilomar beach, and we sat in your van on the side of the road and watched the sunset over the ocean. we were waiting to see if we could see the green flash, the moment the sun finally sunk into the sea. and i swear to god we saw it. sometimes, being around you was magic like that. 

the last time i saw you in person was the first time i ever ate salted caramel. it always makes me think of you, now. you came to visit mom and i, just for the day, and we drove to yountville and sonoma, and we bought fancy sweets and bread and lunchmeat. you bought a container of salted caramels at bouchon and shared them with mom and i. 

after my mom told me you died, i went and got a salted caramel frappucino, because you were also the first person to give me caffeinated coffee. (we were at a gymnastics meet for michael and katie; i left my guiness book of world records in your car.) i walked on the beach and poured some of the coffee into the foaming ocean waves. 

the last time we spoke was over the phone, sitting in my mom’s car in the dark safeway parking lot after my high school graduation. you told me you loved me. you told me you were proud of me. 

i wish you could see me now. i wish you could see me graduated from college, holding down a steady job, living with the love of my life. 

one of my earliest memories is of your house. i don’t know how old i was, but i was young. i was going over for a sleepover with katie, all by myself, for the first time. we met you half way between our houses, for lunch. i’m pretty sure it was an applebees. we took katie to gymnastics that night, and it was storming, and you drove me around in the rain. then it started hailing. we stopped by the side of the road, by this vast, icy puddle, and gathered hail stones into a water bottle, so katie could see them. we put them in your freezer. you saved them for years. 

i wrote this at work. i have a lot of complicated feelings about my father. these are some of them 

content notes: familial death, alcoholism, mentions of verbal abuse, cancer

a vagueness, building somewhere, me left wondering what it is. where it’s going. 

sometimes emptiness has a weight, and that is the feeling in my chest, like my heart was a balloon full of the world’s heaviest gas. there’s nothing there but it’s sinking down, down, down. 

the way the mental and the physical bleed together, sitting on the sofa, thinking about the slow throb in my ribs 

is the pain in my chest, or my chest? i don’t know how to tell anymore. i don’t know if they’re different anymore. 

how do you know if the way your body feels is wrong when it’s the only way you have ever felt? 

i had only ever used it broken, how was i supposed to know. 

i never used to cry and now i cry all the time. like i thought i was stopping the faucet from leaking but i just unhooked the water line. but one day it rained and rained and rained, and the pipes rusted and leaked and leaked and rusted and they drip into the old damp chipboard cabinets.

this body is cold and damp, but it is home. 

like a hermit crab who crawled into a shell much to big for him and never left, it is my only home. 

like skin that doesn’t fit like bones that knock and chafe