A Letter to My Father Fifteen Months after His Passing

​​April – May 2023

 

Dear Dad,

        I thought I saw you on the subway today. You were standing halfway down the car, near one of the doors, reading. Your head bowed over the book in that particular way you had. Looking as you looked maybe fifteen years ago – your hair and goatee still dark, your shoulders thicker. Balanced on your feet. Wearing a blazer over a plaid shirt.

       I wanted to go to you. But I stayed seated, glancing over now and then, tears in my eyes. I’ve been going through a rough patch lately and it would have been a consolation to be taken into your arms and held. You always knew how to hold your children. In your arms, I could feel your gratitude for me, which always made me feel lucky – lucky to have you as my father and lucky to be alive.

        Despite these hard times, I haven’t stopped feeling lucky. A gift, I think, from you and from Mom. I’ve known people, know people, who don’t feel that way about living, about their lives. Yet even when life has me feeling battered – you know the feeling I’m talking about – I look at it with wonder and gratitude. You and Mom, our family, and my boys, and the people I’ve loved – including two who, in different ways, have recently left my life – and my friends, and my work, my travels, and the places I’ve lived, now in Harlem, this sacred place, so like you in many respects: strange, full of life, self-destructive, endlessly creative, wild – unlike anywhere else on earth. As you were unlike anyone else on earth. You would have liked my neighborhood, made many friends. It makes me sad that we didn’t get to spend time here together. I can imagine you at some of my favorite spots – Maison Harlem, Osteria Laura, Mess Hall, Sugar Monk. Talking to everyone, fitting right in, better at that than I’ll ever be.

        I confess that it’s taken me a while to mourn losing you. I did mourn, but not like this. I’m not sure why grief has gone like that for me. Maybe it’s not uncommon. It’s taken over a year – really, it’s taken me being alone, finally. I know I was carrying some anger towards you for a long time, as children do sometimes. I never understood, for example, why you would never call me. If we were to speak, I had to reach out to you. And other things I didn’t understand – still don’t, never will, I guess. But right now they feel unimportant. Imagining that I knew enough of your life to judge things about you that I didn’t understand – ridiculous. You were and always will be one of the most mysterious people I’ve ever known, maybe the most mysterious, and it makes no sense to judge a mystery. I’ve been learning that lesson pretty forcefully in my own life lately. Maybe that’s why the grief has finally arrived.

        I’m calling it grief, and it has been that, but also I’ve been feeling a sense of wonder, thinking about you, even awe, as if I’m a boy again, the boy I was for so many years, who saw you as larger than life, as a kind of titan. As a force of nature who had figured something out about how to live life, really live it. Not in the way most people do but with an ongoing need to be as big as life itself, as if that were possible. You seemed to make the world shake – there might have been something Californian about that, which could explain why you were so bewildering to people in Utah, for instance – but really just about anywhere you went. A human earthquake. I know you felt like an earthquake to me throughout my childhood, my youth. And I loved it. It made me proud that my father, in whatever company, always seemed like the father.

        I don’t know if that would make sense to others, but it makes sense to me. Especially now. Of all your children, I had the most time with you during the formidable years of your youth, and it always felt to me like intentionally or not you kept pulling me, your quieter, bookish son, into life. In some ways you still do that. I know I wouldn’t have moved to Harlem if I hadn’t been your son. It could be that I moved here to continue to get, by whatever means, the too-much-life that I was lucky enough to feel at your side for so many years. New York City has become your surrogate, reminding me, as you did, that life is to be lived, whatever the cost.

        The cost, as you knew from your own experience, has been high. I called what I’m going through a rough patch. But really it’s been a kind of desolation. It seems like over the past couple of years I’ve undertaken a project of self-destruction, slowly dismantling myself in ways that seem both baffling and necessary. Following some kind of maybe unreliable but expedient intuition, making decisions – if they can be called decisions – that to others, including my sons, were no doubt bewildering. The kinds of things a person might do who feels they don’t deserve to be happy. But the kinds of things I’ve had to do because I’m your son and I’m going to live, and to live properly some parts of me had to be – still have to be – demolished.

        That’s sounds melodramatic. It is – but I’m ok with that. You were melodramatic about your life, and that always seemed to me more honest that stoicism or caution or humility.

        You were never humble not because you thought you were better than anyone else – a problem I have – but because you didn’t have time for it. There were people to meet and places to go and experiences to be tracked down and seized and gone through, come what may. I don’t have your courage, but in my lesser way, I’ve been reckless, willing to suffer, in a manner that feels right because you modeled it. I’ve tried to model that for my sons as well, and I love to see that same hunger for life in them. The same need for the unknown, for beauty – a rejection of passivity, of obedience, of convention. Of course they’ve gotten a good dose of that will-to-live from their mother, too; from the two of us, they’ve inherited qualities that you embodied: aliveness, curiosity, courage in the face of misunderstanding, and generosity with love. Lincoln, Zach, and Sam love life, they fiercely love the people who matter to them, and they respect their time on this earth. They aren’t going to let it go to waste. Yes, in this regard, they are your grandsons.

        These are the things I’ve been thinking about lately, missing you terribly. Wishing I could call you and have you call me el primogénito upon hearing my voice, and knowing I could cry and tell you what I’m going through and you would reassure me, remind me that for you I’m extraordinary and going to be ok. And coming from you I would believe it. I would know it. You would turn my devastation – if that’s the word for it – into a necessary beginning: the beginning, again, of the rest of my life.

        Sometimes I’ve told myself since your passing – before, too – that you didn’t really understand me. That could be a way of defending myself against the idea that you understood me too well. That you saw in me enough of yourself that to watch me live was to watch yourself, continuing. Actually, I think that’s true of all your kids. We are you, continuing.

        The beauty of that idea is that it shows how various you were, that all of us, so different, contain your multiplicity, your complexity. Each of us carrying on different sides of you and showing how many lives you contained, how many lives you lived. Sometimes talking with my brothers and sisters I would wonder about how different you were with each of us. I would ask, Who is Dad, really? Too often failing to understand that you were all those different selves and that wasn’t something to lament but to treasure.

        I could go through each child and name the qualities that I think we’ve taken from you and, in our own ways, magnified. Or distilled to a neater, clearer essence. I have a habit – also learned from you – of diagnosing people and telling them, mostly in my head, about themselves. But I prefer tonight to honor another habit learned from you – and from Mom – of simply loving them.

 

~

 

        Today was one of the hard days. I’ve been having the unusual – for me – experience of sitting on my couch, looking out the window, and not really crying but just letting tears come in silence, not moving. And wondering at my loneliness, as I wondered at yours. Like you at certain times in your life, I find myself far from the people I most love. And I ask myself, How could this happen? Am I fool?

     Of course I’m a fool: I’m your son! But fools – if they’re not just fools – are rewarded for their foolishness with wisdom. And you were never just a fool, which gives me hope for myself. Your sense of humor, your unwillingness to stop living, to stop loving – those are not the qualities of a fool. Those are the qualities of a wise person who understands what matters in life. Who at some level, with the passage of time, looks back on his foolishness with a sense of indebtedness. Who rejects regret and self-loathing for compassion and laughter. That was one of your mysteries: even when you were at your lowest, you never stopped laughing. At life, at yourself, with your first-born son, while we watched each other re-make our lives.

 

~

 

        I guess this letter will be with me for a while, for when I need to talk to you. I haven’t seen you on the subway again, but oddly since that happened I’ve been seeing you everywhere. Not embodied as you were that day but embodied by people I’ve met, by experiences I’ve had, by this strange teeming city, which keeps on, as you did, and summons from me by some unnamable force – one of New York’s secrets – a similar ongoingness. Like you, it won’t let me quit. More than that, it has a way of knocking me over with joy. So much life! You keep showing up here and escorting me back into wonder.

     I’ve been doing a lot of writing again, which would make you happy. Poetry – your first love – and a memoir disguised as fiction and travel writing, because in New York you travel, every day. It’s a trip around the world to go to the corner bodega. To sit on the stoop outside my front door.

        This city feels haunted in the best possible way by your presence. Just when I most need you, you’re here.

 

~

 

        The NBA playoffs are under way and it upsets me I can’t call you to talk about the games. That you aren’t part of our group chats, where we troll each other and share outlandish opinions as if they’re self-evident facts and marvel at the beauty and unpredictability of this game we love. This game you and I played together since I was two.

        One of my first memories – and I’m not actually sure it’s a memory; it’s more likely just an image I saw in a picture – is sitting with you on the roof in El Paso and “helping you” – at the ripe old age of two – put up a basketball hoop. Am I making that up? I see it plainly, as if it happened yesterday.

     I don’t care if I’m making it up, to be honest: I want that first memory and refuse to be deprived of it.

 

~

 

        One of the last big gifts you gave us was a collection of your poetry, Dirt Road Epiphanies. I have it here on the little shelf next to my desk. Of late I’ve been putting together my own collection of poems, some of them 30 years old, inspired in part by your book. In this regard, too, you’ve been haunting me. Led me to see myself as you. This love for words you gave me – I was born, thanks to you, into a home filled with books; I grew up watching you read, one of your qualities that I took it upon myself to magnify. Books being in some ways – not all of them healthy, maybe – the first love of my life. They continue to be a sanctuary, as they were for you, and even more than basketball I miss talking to you about what I’m reading and hearing you tell me about what you’ve been reading, the two of us then going off to the bookstore or going online to buy each other’s books. A book club of two, for so many years.

        I continue that tradition with my sons. Whenever I speak with them, especially with Sam, we talk about what we’re reading. Which makes me really happy. I feel myself coming alive, returning to a love that you and I shared. 

        Right now I’m reading two great novels: Only Yesterday, by S. Y. Agnon, and Chilean Poet, by Alejandro Zambra. You would have loved both of them, especially Chilean Poet. Which you would have read in Spanish, of course. I’m reading other books too – like you, one or two books never enough. I’m pretty sure that any good book I read, for the rest of my life, I’ll think at some point about wanting to tell you about it and imagining how you would listen, as enthusiastic about it as me, and the next time we spoke you would tell that you’d bought it and read it or started reading it, four-colored pen in hand, underlining, circling, annotating.

 

~

 

        I was in CVS this morning down in Midtown, in search of a Mother’s Day card. And Don Henley came on over the store’s music system, “The Heart of the Matter.” Hearing it, my first thought was, Please, not this right now. Some of the lyrics being too on-point, at the moment.

        Then, I remembered driving with you to Salt Lake City, I forget why, and that song came on, and you started crying. This was when you were going through your divorce from Mom. I sat awkwardly next to you – I see the same patient awkwardness in my sons when I cry in front of them, as I did the other night during a Zoom call. It’s frightening – disorienting – to see a father cry, I guess, no matter how old we are.

        In the car, when the song was about over, you said, Eric, will you do me a favor?

        Of course, I said.

        I’d like you to play that song to your mom. It would mean a lot to me if you’d do that. I don’t think she’d listen to it if I asked her to, but if you play it for her, maybe she will.

        Yes, I’ll do that, I said.

        I don’t think I ever did. I knew she was angry with you, and maybe it seemed more important to me to honor her anger. I probably thought she needed it to survive. Forgiveness was for another day.

        Forgiveness – the song is about forgiveness, as you know, and I’ve had trouble with the concept of forgiveness for a while now. Maybe since reading, in The Writing of the Disaster, “To forgive is first to condemn.”

        I’ve decided that there isn’t anything to forgive between us, in part because I don’t think, as I said earlier, that I understand you, which means I can’t condemn you, to then forgive you. Who am I to set myself up as your judge? I’d rather be your son.

        I was glad, anyway, when the song ended, and I paid for the card I’d found and walked to the subway, stepped onto a car, and found myself next to a man standing beside a grocery cart full of garbage. Food scraps, empty bottles and cans – literally, a cart of trash. He stood with it as if he’d just gone shopping and was on his way home. And my fellow New Yorkers sat around him as if this were perfectly normal.

        I walked to the middle of the car and glanced at him now and then to be sure I was really seeing this. His nonchalant attitude soon made me smile. And suddenly again I saw him as you, as myself, as all of us. Each of us pushing around a cart of leftovers and scraps, guarding it because it’s ours – our life. The old meals, the empty bottles, the discarded Mother’s Day cards, and whatever else we’re holding onto, in one form or another. Baffling trash to everyone else, maybe, but precious to us. Some of it too precious or harmful and better left behind, no doubt – but our lives, in the end, taken with us wherever we go. We let go of what we should when we’re ready. This letter, which is a way of trying to summon you, might also be a way of letting go of you.

        So tonight – it’s actually early morning – I’m thinking that it would be good for me to end this letter. Maybe because I suspect that’s what you’d want. I can hear you telling me, Thank you, Eric, but it’s time for you to get back to your life. Telling me that you’re with me, always will be, and I can talk to you whenever I want or need to.

        But I don’t want to let go of this. There’s been so much loss in my life lately – or what’s felt like loss, but loss is another word for change – that I feel myself holding on to this, a conversation with you that has been a source of strength and reassurance. And has felt overdue. In which I’m finally letting myself grieve the fact that we will never speak again. I will never hear your voice again or feel your arms around me or hear your laughter, your expressions of love. I will never see you again, Dad – not on the subway, not anywhere. It seems impossible for that to be true. But it is true. You are gone.

        But not gone! You live on in memory; but far more than that, you live on in me, in my brothers and sisters, in their children, in my sons, in children yet to be born. In the lives of everyone you touched, changed forever, all of us so lucky to carry you with us. In our bodies, our souls. A legacy – your legacy – that makes your being gone impossible. Maybe that’s why my grief has taken the shape it has: I really don’t believe in your death. At your funeral, at the memorials we held after your passing, I saw you everywhere I looked, just as I saw you on the subway nearly a month ago and still see you, all the time. Especially when I look in the mirror. And when I look at the faces of my children, who will be here soon, and I will take them into my arms as you taught me to, wholeheartedly. Filled with gratitude. For them, for life, for you.

 

Love always, tu primogénito,

Eric

The Django

Sitting again with you at the Django, waiting for Lucy and Grant to take the stage – our doppelgänger couple – you as from Day One the one for me despotically luminous creature in the room buy as if you're unhappy a double shot of vodka. Which you consume in a single swallow. So I order a bottle of wine and a second and by the end of the night we’re sharing what we can’t finish with table neighbors.

 

And you weren’t unhappy, not then, and not when dozing on my shoulder on the A Train, or in my arms in bed after maybe puking a bit. In the near-dawn while you slept I thought: They see us as allies, too, recognizing our surprise, gratitude, safety.

Those things don’t last but probably shouldn’t. The courageous being condemned to grief by their courage.

 

Still, listening half-drunk we knew we’d found what Lucy was singing about, what Grant played, and I suppose we knew we'd ruin it. But we listened long enough to forget what we feared and let ourselves become what we heard. The songs were right. Nothing else awaits.

The Universe Gives You What You Need

Sitting on the stoop last night around midnight, a warm night, or it had been, the wind now starting to blow, and a white BMW parked in front of me with two men seated drinking and listening to music, windows down.

 

I’m somewhere through a second or third cigarette when the man in the driver’s seat looks over at me and says, “How you doin?”

 

“Going through a breakup,” I say.

 

The man in the passenger seat gets out of the car and walks around, over to me. “Come here, man, have a drink.”

 

I come off the stoop and he gives me a plastic cup and pours out some tequila. “Thank you,” I say. Together we drink.

 

The man in the driver’s seat says, “What you want to hear?”

 

“My friend, whatever you’re feeling is fine,” I say.

 

He says, “I think you need some Phil Collins.”

 

I imagine he says this because I’m white. I say, “No, how about some Marvin Gaye.”

 

“Marvin Gaye? Ok, I got you.” He puts on Marvin Gaye and gets out of the car and we all have another drink.

 

I say, “You’ve been through it too, right?”

 

“Man, we all been through it,” the driver says. “How long?”

 

“Together a year and a half,” I say. “But I loved her for a lot longer than that.”

 

“Just happened?”

 

“It’s been happening,” I say. “Tonight it feels like it just happened.”

 

Marvin Gaye at that moment singing about blue teardrops, I hear, with the passenger singing along. I light another cigarette and we listen. The passenger stops singing and says, “You gotta keep on, just like the sun. Went down today and it’s night but in a few hours it’s gonna come back up. That how you gotta do. You will. I see it.”

 

The driver says, “And even now it’s night but you still got the stars. Just gotta look up.”

 

“And this,” I say, “us together.”

 

“Exactly,” the driver says. “You understand.”

 

The passenger says, “Man, you speak another language?”

 

“Spanish,” I say. “I lived in Argentina.”

 

“See,” he says, “I knew you spoke another language because you said that about us together.”

 

“I grew up Mormon,” I say. “Went there to save them and they saved me.”

 

“You were one of those accomplices or collaborators or whatever they call them,” the driver says.

 

“Missionaries,” the passenger says.

 

“That’s it, missionaries,” the driver says. He toasts the passenger with his empty cup and the passenger pours us another round.

 

“Came back,” I say, “and I didn’t know what I was. But I knew I wasn’t God, which is what I thought I was when I went. Still don’t know what I am but that’s ok, I guess.”

 

“Man,” the driver says, “you know what you are, you a human being, just like us.”

 

“No more, no less,” the passenger says.

 

The driver points at the passenger and says, “This man here, he’s an inspirational speaker.”

 

“Just what I need tonight,” I say and we all laugh.

 

The passenger says, “I’ll tell you this, man. And I’m gonna tell you this because I think you can hear it and understand it. You can see for yourself if it applies to your situation, I don’t know. But in a relationship, we’re always tryin to turn the other person into something we know. Because we know how to deal with that. Usually that means we tryin to turn them into our parents. Probably the bad parent because we convinced somewhere inside them is the bad parent, and we gotta know if it’s there. The killer. So we try to bring it out. And if we do, we run because we knew all along we were right, they a killer. And if we don’t, we still run, because we scared. We got this new thing we don’t know how to deal with. So you got to figure out why she ran – she, right?”

 

“Yeah,” I say.

 

“So figure out why she ran. Because you turned into a killer or because you didn’t. If you turned into a killer, then you sittin on this stoop tonight is on you. And if you didn’t, then you be awright.”

 

“I think I turned into a killer,” I say.

 

“Or you was one all along,” the driver says.

 

“I started to let myself be mean to her,” I say.

 

“She was waitin for that,” the passenger says. “So there you go.”

 

“I need another drink,” I say.

 

“I got you,” the passenger says, and we all drink.

 

I say, “I thought I was trying to be something new in her life. Not one of her ex’s. Not her father or her mother. For her father she can do no wrong and for her mother she can do no right.”

 

“It’s like that with daughters sometimes, man,” the driver says.

 

“But there has to be another space,” I say. “A new space. I thought that's what I was trying to find.”

 

“There is,” the passenger says. “Love is like nature, my man, love has both life and death. Sometimes we think it has to be all life. And we give every drop of blood to keep it alive. But there’s death in love, too, and you gotta accept that. You can’t kill yourself tryin to keep it alive, that makes no sense. You just have to let it live and die and live, just let it flow, let it do what it do. We get told” – he points at all of us – “we gotta fix everything but in love there’s nothin to be fixed. You just let it flow through, like you standin in a river, because you are. The universe is a river you just gotta stand in. A river of life and death, a river of love because that’s what love is, life and death. You try to fix it, now you the killer. You tryin to fix somethin that wasn’t broken and never has been. The universe or this girl. The universe gives you what you need if you let it.”

 

We’re all quiet for a moment. I look at the driver. “Damn,” I say, “you weren’t lying.”

 

“I told you, man,” the driver says. “Inspirational speaker.”

 

“I gotta give you a hug, man,” I say, and the passenger and I hold each other.

 

“You be awright,” the passenger says.

 

“One more?” I ask.

 

“Hold up,” the driver says. He taps on his phone.

 

Phil Collins, “In the Air Tonight,” starts up on the car stereo, Harlem-loud. We stand there for a while and listen.

 

Soon, tears on my cheeks, I say to the driver, “You were right. That is what I needed.”

 

“I know,” he says. “I know.”

 

“We've all been there, right?” I ask.

 

“What you talkin about, man?” the driver says. “We all there now.”

Carnage

You take my hand, lead

Me to the bedroom, and soon

We are covered in blood.

 

Showering later you say

Something kind about my face

And I think: Your face is

A tyrant, your body

A thundering cavalry –

And when by text

However long later

You ask if after

Having lost you

I’m ok, I write, Shattered

That we made real

What I'd most feared.

You probably thought

Upon reading that and now

Upon reading this: He

Has a penchant for self-

Pitying melodrama. You

Wouldn't be wrong, but

 

I remember your hand,

Your blood, your sighs,

The sight of your hair

Wet with sweat across

Your cheek while writhing

bloodsmeared beneath me,

Around me, you were,

For an infinite

Moment, mine.

"Absolutely Not."

A couple of days ago – Valentine's Day – walking east on 123rd I passed a man on the phone with his daughter. He had her on speaker, or they were Facetiming, and as I passed I heard her say, "Dad, yes, they can." The voice and intonations of an eight-year-old Black New Yorker, high and forceful, swinging, confident.

The father replied, "Absolutely not. A boy cannot give another boy a valentine. Absolutely not."

The girl, even more forcefully: "Yes, they can."

And the father, "Absolutely not. Absolutely not."

They continued in this vein; soon I was out of earshot, Central Harlem mixing their voices into the city's howl.

I texted my brother Nathan. Understandably, he seemed less charmed than annoyed. He said, "Good lord. Turn around and say, your daughter is right."

"Or," I proposed, "my brother does it, so apparently they can."

I continued on to my friend Brad's up on 129th. From there down to Nomad, then over to Chelsea; eventually, home. The argument between father and daughter forgotten.

But this morning, finding it difficult to sleep, I remembered their exchange and found myself thinking about that father's "absolutely not."

In the first place I was struck by its futility. Plainly we do live in world – certainly we do in New York City – where boys can give valentines to boys. I thought, I was listening to a man defend a world that no longer exists. His daughter lives in the real world – in the actual world. And he was trying to get her to live in his world, a defunct world, the world of the past.

I suppose this experience – realizing that one lives in a world that no longer exists – is one of the horrors of aging. That horror might explain why so many older people become, relative to their younger selves, conservative, reactionary, and grumpy. In any case, their particular argument is enacted daily in various forms by millions of kids and their parents.

But beyond that, I thought, his "absolutely not" captures the horror of conservatism generally and its determination to compel us to live in a nonexistent world. To deny the world's fluidity, the permanence of change, in short: reality. The world. That little girl lives in the world. Her father does not.

My reaction at the time, having not been oppressed by that father's particular "absolutely not," was to find their argument charming and reason for hope. Nathan, who understands that "absolutely not" all to well, who has heard it ringing in his ears all of his life, wanted a fight. One must defend reality, the hard-earned world-as-it-is, against those who would have us live, whatever their reasons, in a world that no longer exists.

Ten Things I'll Never Do Again

1) Watch The Bachelor, obviously. After finishing our Blue Apron (having argued again about how long to cook the chicken). You secretly film my reactions to the Rose Ceremony. Laugh at the way I go from feigning indifference to yelling at the screen. To saying, "Can you believe the way these people sabotage their own happiness?"

 

2) Listen, still groggy with sleep, to you tell me about your night’s dreams. I squint at the light coming through the blinds. Your large eyes, unblinking, examine my face. "You should write those dreams down," I say. "I should write them all down."

 

3) Stand on our balcony and watch you drive away in a rush, the boys due to arrive. You take the left turn off Continentals Ave, accelerate – small in the gray sedan – away, up Ralston. Going to your mother's for the weekend. Until Sunday evening, when you call or text, asking when you can come home.

 

4) Walk to 122nd and Adam Clayton Powell. Take the M2 to 110th, east to 5th Ave, down to 92nd. Get off the bus and walk to 2nd Ave, to wait outside Knickerbocker Plaza for you to descend. Hail a cab or walk with you to NR. Hot ramen. Later, at Bar & Essen, a nightcap. The slow walk back. Outside Knickerbocker I hug you and tell you I love you and watch you pass through your lobby, see you say goodnight to the doorman. I walk then for a while. At some point rent a Citi bike and ride back to Harlem, using the Central Park loop, crying or trying not to cry.

 

5) Stand holding you, my eyes closed. Rest my chin on top of your head; inhale. Think: A perfect fit.

 

6) Argue with you about getting a dog.

 

7) Drive together up the coast to Crescent City, on to Portland, or down the coast to Monterey, or from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas. Or in an Uber along the Cabo San Lucas coastline. Or, most memorably, on a luminous Saturday morning, from Belmont to Berkeley, to the Wright Institute for your applicant's interview, to the beginning of the rest of your life.

 

8) Hold you while you remember your father.

 

9) Help you: edit a paper, decipher a reading, think through a patient, compose an email, cope with one of your brothers’ calls. Brew your morning coffee, brew our nighttime tea, undress you, fall asleep in your arms, fall back asleep (after telling you, "A nightmare. It’s Ok. You're safe").

 

10) Weep like this. Motionless, silent – stunned by gratitude and regret and terror. Because I don't know how to imagine a world without you. A siren goes by, fades; Harlem light, so unlike California's – colder, more severe – falls on some flowers I put in the window. I think, One day this grief will pass. But I don't want it to pass. Then you'll really be gone.