I posted a picture of him for a silly Instagram-related game and found him waiting for me in my dreams, something which occurs so rarely it still explodes solidly-constructed dams inside me each time I see his face, mustached and smiling at mine just the way he always did, just the way I always remember him. As usual he didn’t say much, not anything I could hear or remember, but he was there and I knew it, and when I traded dreamscape for a bedroom ceiling speckled with hues of pre-dawn blue my left hand was curled as if his right were still clasped around it, once-distant memories made painfully present and quietly but persistently ensuring I wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon.

River walking as I am today, it seemed appropriate to share words from water previously forded, images remembered and collected and poured into a submission-of-sorts this past November.

———–

Sometimes I swear I would have saved him.

Swear I could have rescued his breath from the icy depths into which he so foolishly and voluntarily dove, if only he had provided me the opportunity to play fearless, to play savior. I was twelve at the time, almost thirteen. I knew how to act older. I was a good swimmer.

Rationale tells me we both would have drowned that day.

Some days I can feel my blood crying out for his, and an overwhelming sense of loyalty, of family, succeeds in convincing me I wouldn’t have cared. That it would have somehow been right, noble even, for me to sink to the bottom of that river with him.

Sometimes when I’m sitting next to her on a particularly pleasant spring day, her voice loud, myself mere feet from where her shape-shifting body brazenly cuts itself over rock and bank–her rushing waters background music to those thoughts of mine strong enough to overcome such a deafening roar–I feel her icy pulse rushing through me, liquid electricity, and for a the briefest of moments my loss sits still, lapping lazily in sixteen years’ time.

The rest of the time I sit and stare.

I stare at the way she moves-unforgivingly fast, cruel and cool in her perpetual serenity-and I’m amazed at how after everything she’s taken from me I still find her absolutely breathtaking. Strong and stunning, proudly drenched in apathy toward everything but her own power, I could watch her lunging past me for hours.

I wonder and write stories in my head about the lives she still holds captive underneath her fluid visage. I battle quietly with the naïve, impulsive, wannabe hero in me: the hero who assures me I could jump headfirst into her ice-cold heart and live to the see the opposite bank.

The hero who lies.

Today, if not for icicles draped across branches of a small fir tree growing boldly between crevices of a rock cluster on which I sit, her waters look inviting, maybe even warm. But it’s still early April, and she doesn’t fool anyone easily this time of year. Proof of her malice manifests itself in a world frozen all around her, layers of splashing river water quickly becoming incriminating fingerprints of solid ice.

In my dreams I see a woman with brambles for hair and tendrils for fingers. Her voice spirals along the riverbank, years of practice yielding her song a pitch-perfect match to the foamy water churning feverishly below where she sits, pointedly perched on an uneven slab of granite, her skin sun-baked and clutching her bones hungrily. She whispers his name, four syllables splashing off her tongue onto nearby reeds. She waits for the current to give back what it took.

———–

This week I’ve been finding pieces of writing long lost and forgotten. Unearthing words belonging to me, and words penned by some of my favorite of all literary voices, collected and saved and scrawled excitedly on pages littered with foggy memories of past lives, obscured now in light of all that was and is and is to come.

Of the words not belonging to me, Lucille Clifton’s were the ones I found most often, recounted in notebook after notebook, or inked on napkins from memory during a particularly quiet night behind the bar. It makes sense I would find her again now, as I always do when I’m feeling quiet with so much to say. Her poems never cease to pour themselves into me, make me want to tell taller, stronger, better stories.

And stories for you I certainly have. As soon as I can find them all.

In the meantime, I’ll let Clifton do the talking, especially because “further note to clark” is perhaps my favorite of all her poems. One of them, anyway.

———-

further note to clark

do you now how hard it is for me?
do you know what you’re asking?

what i can promise to be is water,
water plain and direct as Niagara.
unsparing of myself, unsparing of
the cliff i batter, but also unsparing
of you, tourist. the question for me is
how long can i cling to this edge?
the question for you is
what have you ever traveled toward
more than your own safety?

Something big happened today. A big workplace something that is so big I can’t really talk about it yet except to say it was the positive culmination of months of hard work, ridiculously late nights at the office, literal hair-pulling over budgets I never would have saw myself creating in a thousand years, me the English Lit. major, even after all of my math teachers tried to collaboratively warn me my life would be laden with calculations and equations whether I liked it or not.

We got the news around 10:30am this morning and the rest of the day was sunshine and rainbows, proverbially of course, being that Portland is still nestled cozily underneath an almost perpetual blanket of April showers.

The sheer elation I felt was unexpected and thrilling, and for the first time in years you were one of the first people I wanted to call, to tell you how excited I was. To tell you how important this is, to me and the company for whom I work so diligently, maybe even too diligently sometimes. I wanted to call and hear your voice on the other end of the line, laughing and congratulating me, and telling me one more time, like you did when I won my 6th grade Spelling Bee, that I didn’t get my academic genes from you. You were always so much better outside of a classroom than in one.

I’m not sure why you were one of the first voices I wanted to hear, because logically I know I can’t call you, haven’t been able to call you in almost sixteen years now.

Maybe it’s because today is April 6th. Your birthday was yesterday. The anniversary of the day you left this earth is looming on the horizon, just eight short days away.

April is always so unpredictable. Like missing you, like missing anyone, is.

Still I think you would be proud of me. If that’s possible from where you are. (I very much hope it is.)

Love and mustaches and way too many Excel spreadsheets,

Kerri Anne

*Post title from The Alternate Routes’ “All That I Can See.”

Fleece pretense
thrown over my shoulders
much too heavy, much too

warm.

A flashlight,
blindfold,
a shell I found in Korea, nowhere
near the sea.

A hatred

of all things solid,
sturdy like wood.

A Mason jar of river water
stolen from her belly
April 15th, 1996.

—————-

Inspired by Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

What about you? What do you carry? Feel free to be poetic or literal. I like both.

I was thirteen.

A lot of you know the story. I’ve told it here a few times over the years, from a few different angles.

In short: April has historically been a bit of a bi-polar month for me. April 5th was my dad’s birthday. I really do try to celebrate that day, to celebrate him, and the time, however brief, I had with him. But there’s always another day in April that seems to rain on April 5th’s parade.

On April 5, 1995, my dad turned 39. Ten days later he drowned in the river that runs through my hometown. April 15th. 15 years ago, today.

A day after reading Kris’ post I had a dream about my dad. That sentence might not be so surprising if I regularly, or ever, had dreams about him. As it is, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve dreamed about my dad since his death fifteen years ago. I can remember each one vividly. They stay with me when they come.

In this dream I found a video that had been made when I was just a little girl. There was sunshine and laughter and I was twirling around the grass in the backyard of the house where I spent my entire childhood. Then the video cut to my father’s face, looking stern and worried and I watched from somewhere in my subconscious as he spoke to the video camera. “I want to see her. I want to see my daughter. Where is she?” He was distraught, determined, as if I were the one who had been lost all this time.

I woke up crying and calling out to him to stay. Please, stay. For just a little while.

In fifteen years that’s never happened to me. A big part of me doubts it will ever happen again.

How losing a parent (losing any loved) changes you is such a difficult picture to paint, for obvious reasons of course, and also because I think the loss changes, and of course changes us, as the years go by.

Sometimes the loss is barely, rarely felt. Maybe we’re too young when the loss is suffered, our memories too malleable, too uncertain. Maybe there wasn’t enough time to make lasting impressions, to memorize noses and fingers and the sound of a laugh.

Other times the loss is much more tangible, and instead of fading with each passing year, the empty shelves inside you seem to grow as you do, as you come to understand the full breadth of your loss.

I lost my father when I was thirteen, and it remains the single most transforming (and the single most difficult) event of my life. In 1995 I  primarily and overwhelmingly felt confused. I felt angry. I didn’t believe I was never going to see him again. I didn’t believe I had lost him.

I didn’t believe any of it, but the tears ran hot down my cheeks day after day and I couldn’t keep them from falling. I was most certainly grieving, but for what? I don’t think I even understood at that point. I didn’t see how not having him with me two, five, ten years from then was going to make me feel. I only knew that not having him right then, not being able to see him, talk to him, hug him and tell him I loved him: it was all mind-numbingly unfair. That I couldn’t see my father anymore was cruel and unacceptable, and so I cried and kicked and screamed and sought to claw my way back to him somehow.

Perhaps fittingly, it was this outpouring of grief, this clawing my way through muddy riverbank, that led me to my first experience with faith, and with God. In one of the books I inherited, collected from the apartment he was never returning to, ECCLESIASTES 3:1-8 was scrawled in my dad’s easily recognizable all-caps handwriting. It was the first Bible passage I ever read.

However raw and honest my initial reaction to his death, I honestly don’t think I began to understand my loss, and to really feel it, until many years later. Until he wasn’t there to watch me hit so many milestones, to meet boyfriends and best friends, and to laugh with me and hold me as I sobbed over broken hearts, skinned knees, little nothings.

It changed everything, losing him. And yet, I’m always struck by how on a global scale, it changed nothing. The world kept spinning as it always did, even though a large part of my world stopped breathing the day he did.

No one taught me what to expect two, five, ten years from the day my mom broke the news that I wasn’t ever going to see my father’s face again, that I wasn’t going to smell his hair when he leaned down to hug me, or watch his mustache curl upward on top of his genuine smile that sat a little crooked on his face, just like mine does even after all those years in braces.

No one taught me what to expect because no one can. It took me years to understand that grief, while a universal emotion, isn’t equally applied to our lives and our hearts. It isn’t felt or overcome the same way by everyone, by anyone.

Every time I post something about my dad I find others, friends and strangers alike, who have lost their fathers, too. Who lost them when they were young, like I did. Who have lived most of their adult lives without them. It’s like a secret club no one wants to belong to. There are others, too, who have lost loved ones more recently, and while there are similarities in our stories, our respective grief, and the way we manage it, remains unique.

So, fifteen years later, I keep swimming, navigating the current of loss as it shifts before me, careful not to tread in any one cold spot too long. There is power in remembering. But there is danger in dwelling, in treading water with someone too long, no matter how much you love and miss them.

In all of my memories, in all of my stories, my dad keeps drowning. He always will. I can’t go back and put myself on that icy riverbank in April so many years ago; I can’t save him.

What I can do is harder than saving him.

I can live without him. I can live happily and vibrantly, and I can try anew every single day not to take any of it for granted. I can try to always recognize this life for the gift that it is, and to love people the way I’ve been loved, the way I’m still loved.

I can be proud to be his daughter, and most days, that’s enough.

Instead, he’s forever 39, or younger, as most of the pictures I have of him, and my favorite pictures of him, were taken long before that last year.

Pictures like this one, even though I was apparently too psyched about the leaf pile to open my eyes:

And this one, of my dad rocking a fun run in Spokane:

I found this one just this past year:

I love that we’re both sporting Member’s Only jackets.

This is my dad and grandmother on Easter Sunday, 1983 (I would have been one):

This is a scan of a Polaroid I still have, taken nineteen! years ago, on a beach of one of my favorite places on the planet:

To this day it’s the one and only time I’ve ever been buried in the sand. And thankfully one of the only times my dad rocked a mullet.

Happy Birthday, Dad. I miss you.

Strangers looked at me with tears in their eyes. Teachers spoke gently, pulled me aside before and after classes to offer condolences. “Was there anything they could do?” they asked a little too loudly.

I despised their gentleness. I abhorred being special in the way I now was. Every teenager wants to be recognized, to be noticed, to be praised for exceptional test scores, for record-breaking attendance, for unparalleled athletic ability. No one wants to be the girl without a father.

I wondered silently why my mother had made me go so school as the flood of unwelcome well-wishing rushed onward. The notes, the awkward hugs and abundant pats on the back, the hideously designed “While you’re grieving” cards. All of it a cruel, unfunny, pathetically maddening joke.

I wore my grief like a badge I had not earned. I smiled wryly as classmates who once ignored me now looked on, interested. My best friends had little to say. Their mothers had advised them to be calm, to be quiet. I wanted to scream, to slur profanities like sloppy joes across the cafeteria, to kick and fight and flee every wayward glance that sought to canvass my grief.

I was twelve, almost thirteen. No one had taught me how to lose my father.

I would have sooner kicked someone in the shins than cried. I wouldn’t realize I was allowed to feel anything but sorrow until college. Someone kind, a Professional, would tell me anger is normal, to be expected. One of many phases I would be forced to traverse on a rocky road to healing. That Monday I felt mostly nothing. I walked around wrapped snugly in a fog of stoicism rising from somewhere deep inside me I didn’t create and couldn’t find. I wasn’t accustomed to everyone staring. And there were questions. Too many questions to which I had no answers. Not then, not yet.

He is dead. Yes, he died. Drowned. No, he was a good swimmer. I don’t know. No, no funeral yet. Maybe. Mike. His name was Mike. Michael Francis Ladish. He was thirty-nine. Yes, five sisters. Well, four, actually. One of them identified his body. Hypothermia, they said. He was my father, ‘the deceased.’ What does it matter if he’s being cremated? I DON’T KNOW.

Years later I would forge a conversation in my head while my mother and I drove across the river where my father took his last breath.

“Mom, you know you shouldn’t have sent us back to school the day after he died.”

“I know, dear. I thought it would help.”

“You only thought it would help you.”

“I know, dear.”

I remember the way he had to hunch himself over to hug me. Until the day he didn’t have to anymore. I was twelve. I remember that, too: suddenly, unexpectedly, being tall enough to reach him. Tall enough to see the laughter in his eyes when he was hugging my sister and I.

I remember the way his deodorant smelled. Like Old Spice. Like him. I remember the way his mustache tickled my cheek when we hugged. Every time.

I remember the way his hands shook, uncontrollably. The effect of a medicine he had to take daily, to be well enough to spend time with us. I remember how it used to embarrass him. I remember asking abrupt, ten-year-old questions. I hurt his feelings because I asked “why.” I didn’t understand. He was sick. Somewhere, I knew that. I had been told. But he was my dad. And so, you see, my dad couldn’t be sick. It was impossible. I rearranged memories to make him well. To make him whole again.

I remember our “traditions.” Special every other weekend customs that were “ours,” and ours alone. I remember the pumpkin patches at GreenBluff, rides that twisted, turned, and made us want to be sick at the fair, home-made huckleberry pancakes every morning, three-hour-long hikes through “the little woods” around my grandmother’s house. This was all before they built condo after condo, and nearly erased the trails that wound from her back porch to the river. I remember stops at Baskin-Robbins for chocolate chip cookie dough ice-cream and rainbow sherbet. Two scoops, in a waffle-cone.

I remember the day I was lost, at the fair. I was eight years old and I was looking at balloons. I let go of his hand to twist to see the different colors. I turned around and, suddenly, I was walking with another family. I looked up to see another man’s face. A stranger. I stopped abruptly. Tears instantly welled. I cried out “Dad,” but instead of his hand, I found another’s. Yet another stranger. This one with a kind voice and soft hands. She led me to a booth where soon after I was given a once-coveted red balloon, but I didn’t want it anymore. I wanted him. I was taken to a “Lost Child Trailer,” where other children were playing peacefully. Toys were strewn across a brown carpeted floor. A lady tried to pique my interest in building blocks. I ignored her, sat on an uncomfortable blue sofa and cried. The moment he opened that trailer door, wide-eyed and horrified, worried and already apologizing, I was up and running toward him, lunging toward his arms, already beginning to forget I had just spent thirty minutes sitting with strange children who seemed more than content to be separated from their parents.
I remember he found me. He looked for me, and he found me. I remember.

I remember wondering if he was looking for me, even then. Even as he was sinking. Was he still looking? I remember I was looking for him. Years and years later, I was still looking for him. Still waiting by the riverside, waiting for him to come home to us. Waiting for him to walk in, dripping wet, but fine. Freezing cold, but smiling the smile that would tell me, that would tell my sister and I it was all a bad dream. He would sit down and tell us where he had been all that time. He would tell us he never really left us.

I remember feeling foggy inside, like his drowning was a dream. I remember feeling as if something had been stolen, but simultaneously feeling that it couldn’t be real. It couldn’t have been stolen from ME. He couldn’t have been stolen. Not from me.

I remember my dad. And even though it still hurts, and sometimes it still hurts badly, I can smile while I remember. I can smile because, for nearly thirteen years, he was my father. He was the one who consistently found me. The one who would never stop looking for me. He was the one who laughed with his eyes. And for all of those years, I was his little girl.

When I remember, I still am. And nothing, not even the deepest, coldest, fastest-running river water can ever change that.

Dad,

It is eleven years now since the April we lost you to icy river water. Eleven years since I last hugged you, since I last awoke to the rich sugary smell of your huckleberry pancakes browning on the stove. Eleven years since I heard the sound of your voice tell me to stop intentionally irritating Theresa, to eat all of my peas, that you loved me.

On Easter that year I read the news of you leaving us before Mom had the chance to tell us herself. I was in a news hungry phase then. I was twelve, almost thirteen, and I read everything I could see, everything I could hold in front of my face. I practiced spelling words forward and backward in the text of newspapers and books just like I started to do with the text adorning billboards and building signs whenever you would drive us around town, or the hour and a half up to the lake.

That day in our newspaper I read the story of a man who dove into the river at a juncture called Donkey Island. Rescue crews were still searching. I didn’t know Donkey Island, was wholly unfamiliar with the stretch of river that had claimed your life, and after reading the short article put the paper down, feeling sorry for the family of the man who I was certain would not resurface alive.

Mom’s words were like short bursts of fist to my abdomen. I instantly felt pain, felt sick, felt exactly like I did in the fifth grade after Brandon Gilbert kicked a soccer ball as hard as he could and I made the mistake of intercepting it with my stomach. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t cry. Instinctively I doubled over and wrapped my arms around my knees.

When you dove you were confused. Disorientated. Upset. I believed them. No one in their right mind would willingly jump into that river in mid-April, its bowels churning wildly with Spring run-off, every wave dripping with the frigidity of freshly melted glacier water.

You probably succumbed to the hypothermia before you drowned, they said. That I didn’t believe. Even then I knew a person could drown faster than they could freeze to death. And I couldn’t see why everyone was so hell bent on believing their telling me such a story was somehow comforting. As if freezing from the inside out was somehow a better alternative to lungs filling with water and drowning the possibility of you ever again breathing.

I used to sit at the river’s edge and wonder if you were scared that day. I wondered what you thought about when you realized there was only the end light ahead of you. Did Theresa and I cross your mind? Were you mouthing that you loved us even as you were fighting to say afloat? Did you call out to us? Did you call out to God? What if I would have heard you first? What if someone would have jumped in to save you?

I don’t know. Not any of it.

I do know that I miss you, that this month I always miss you more than usual. More than what is normally bearable. I do know that, as Lamartine so perfectly stated, “Sometimes when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated.”

I used to feel such anger when faced with the reality that I don’t get to know. So much of the story I must be content to recall only as told by others. Others who are not you, and who can’t tell me what you were feeling or thinking or wishing moments before you left us. I used to feel such anger at the mere thought that I don’t get to know you beyond the twelve and a half years’ time we had, six of which I was too young to remember. It always seemed unfair, cruel even. I wanted more time. Needed more time. Deserved a moment to say good-bye.

Some days I still am angry. Some days I still don’t understand, and don’t want to. But most days I do.

Most days more than angry and broken I am longing and hopeful, thankful for time spent and assured of future time granted. Most days I know I will get to see your face that looks like mine again, and on that day I will get to see the corners of your mouth turn into your mustache as you smile, will get to hear your laugh that to me always sounded like feet dangling off a dock in the summer-time.

Most days I am content in the not knowing. Because most days I know that your plunge to the river bottom was no end. Not for you. And not for me.

Ten years have passed since you last wrote me anything, but still I can vividly remember the way your handwriting looked on the page. Letters scrawled with conscious effort in all capitals. Your penmanship never reflective of the inner chaos so often present within your heart and mind, the slowly etched lines and curve hardly ever revealing the struggle you faced just to hold your hands consistently steady. How neat I remember it always looking. I tried to mimic your affinity for utilizing only capital letters, and soon thereafter laughing at myself and how sloppy it always seemed to appear in comparison to yours. But every now and then when I’m not paying attention my wrist moves the way yours did so many years ago and I form letters and words that make it look as if you yourself had been taking notes with my pen, with my hand. And every time that happens I catch myself holding my breath and feeling you looking at me through ink and lines scribbled hastily on notebook paper. Just tonight I wrote “Dad,” just the way you used to, in the upper left hand corner of all the envelopes encasing all of the cards you sent baby carrot sister and I over the years: Two carefully etched capital “D’s” and one artistically woven lowercase “a.” I still have the last such envelope we received. It’s orange, and has since its original sending been filled with pictures of you, and with pictures of baby carrot sister and I that you kept on the desk in your apartment.

Ten years have fallen like sand through my fingertips and I can still smell you when I close my eyes and drift back to your arms wrapped around me and my head nuzzled into the armpit of your t-shirt that boasted a scent I had memorized, but not labeled. It would be years later until I would recognize the distinct scent of you as the easily identifiable smell of Old Spice deodorant, a scent that upon filling my nostrils to this day stops me where I stand and sends me backward in time, to a movie night at grandma’s house and me curled up on a pillow in your lap, you running your fingers through my brunette hair that turns wavy like yours if it isn’t straightened by some unnatural process, as I drifted off to sleep.

Ten years have etched themselves into the very feel of my skin, have manifested their changes in a physical relocation and the upcoming culmination of an undergraduate career long in the making, in the rekindling of the dearest of friendships, in the reception of new comrades-in-pens, in the severing of connective tissue once linking me to a time in my life when I decided to be self-destructive and selfish.

A decade of growth. Ten winters, and ten springs. Ten summers and ten autumns, and I can still remember how safe I felt with you, how I couldn’t wait for weekends to begin, because weekends meant trips to Greenbluff during the fall to taste cider and get lost in hay mazes and pick lopsided pumpkins to carve. Weekends meant trips to the fair where you would incessantly tease me about riding The Zipper and where I looked at you like you were crazy, and then pretended to be fearless and board rides that secretly terrified me, where baby carrot sister and I could pester you until you relented about playing the arcade style booth games you always told us were impossible to win by design, but that we still always wanted to play because we thought we were different, that we would win. Weekends meant trips to Colbert–to grandma’s–to traipse around our “little woods” and pick buttercups and other wildflowers growing amidst the pine shadowed forest floor for mom, and model airplane building, and movies, and homemade huckleberry pancakes for breakfast. Weekends meant suffering the hour and a half drive that felt like days up to a lake that baby carrot sister and I would come to adore, and need, and consider our very own. But most of all, weekends meant you. Weekends meant the three of us and adventure ripe for the creating.

But weekends never meant perfection, and they, by definition, never meant always. And you never meant perfection, and you couldn’t mean always. Our memories are most surely not flawless, and I’m so glad. I’m glad because ten years later and you are still so real to me. And I am by default more real for having known and for having lost you; Knowing you taught me to feel, and to love whole-heartedly or not at all, and that fathers are blessed and human and flawed. Losing you taught me to see, and how to truly calculate value in this life, and for what to be thankful. Losing you revealed the depths of a family’s love, and taught everyone that knew you how worthy it remains to love whole-heartedly, no matter the potential or inevitable loss involved.

Ten years have elapsed since you left me standing on a riverbank searching the surface of an ice-ridden river in April for some sign of remorse. Since you left me searching her curves and waves for your voice, for the warmth of your skin, for a promise that you were going to emerge and swim back to me.

Ten years later and I can still feel my chest throb painfully as if all of the air in my lungs had been sucked out in an instant: The way it felt the moment mom opened her mouth to tell us you were gone. In a second all recognition of further sound ceased, as if there really was a remote to control the universe and a finger from the heavens had pushed “mute.” I remember being on the floor and looking up at her, unable to breathe or utter a syllable, and thinking you diving into that river in April was a joke. Because you knew better. You, the man that taught me everything I know about water and water safety. The man who taught me to be brave, and to enjoy time spent pool and lake-side, but to still harbor a close-knit, respectful fear of water — a knowledge of its inherent power — so as to prevent foolish behavior. There isn’t anywhere in the world I feel more comfortable than in the water and under it, beating wave and current with my body, paddling, diving, and propelling myself back to the surface, breathing. Always breathing. And I find myself still wanting to dive into that thieving river every year on this day, at the precise location into which you dove ten years ago. I want to save you, and to save me. And to make it across because you didn’t, because you couldn’t.

Ten years and the sensation of wanting to die to be with you still fresh in my memory, the idea that you leaving this earth with me still on it not existing as a feasible reality, still rooted in my brain like the reeds coveting the river’s shoreline. I remember wanting answers, wanting vengeance, but mostly, just wanting you back with me. I remember too desiring to lay underneath the waves and hold my breath as their frigidity passed over me, and feel what you felt as you traveled home via an underwater route.

And the morning I considered running to the river, instead, and through swollen tear-streaked eyes, I looked at the myriad pictures of you scattered across my basement bedroom floor, and then I stood up and looked in the mirror. And in my reflection I saw eyes you helped create, and remnants of your smile in mine, and your nose, and your hands, and your ears. I saw you in me.

And it was in that moment, after thirteen years of life, that I realized that I could never leave this world until called.

And so instead of drowning I cried and kicked and screamed, and missed you, and loved you from here. And in the process I found faith buried at the bottom of a river, lapping steadfastly, undeterred and warm amidst the chill of a volatile, unpredictable current.