(day after) Father's Day

[rabbit hole]

i peered inside myself, looking to recount the previous day, and saw instead the mouth of the void opening wide, half yawn, half laugh, all devouring, all beautiful, the death of self in a thousand sideways glances cast about in coffee shops on a Monday afternoon, day after Father's Day.

[genealogy]

i wonder about my father's father, drunken and dying and 53 years old in a hospital bed on the side of a mountain somewhere in North Carolina. i was two years old, and the only memory i can claim as my own was that of him feeding me chocolate cookies while i sat diapered on the arm of a cigar store Indian... a childhood spent listening to whispers in empty kitchens, constructing a romance of a man i never knew.

i wonder about my father, sober and broken hearted and 56 years old, watching his eldest son die in the passenger seat, driving up the side of that same mountain in North Carolina. he watched a stopped clock feign hypnagogia for 6 ½ years, biding his time, not knowing what to do, and crying to himself at night... two decades spent wishing he had it to do all over again.

[coda]

the wheel of karma spins neither quickly nor slowly, but it is relentless, one score and seven years. there are more lives than this one, and every life has more deaths than we can imagine. may we embrace them all.