2002-05-16 || 11:06 a.m.

|| splinters traveling drifting north. taking refuge inside eyelids, in my bed. ||

it happens at night. when the lights are out and we are lying down. he is looking at the ceiling. i am looking at him. his profile. the way he is blinking and there are no words or sound.

i don't know how to fix this.

there is the matter of the death. there is the matter of the suicide note received in a mail box three weeks after the fact. for the sake of haunting. for the sake of misguided reparation, maybe. more likely a final unintended father to son 'fuck you.' there is the matter of not really knowing how to talk about it. or the anger and confusion. or the way his insides are feeling scraped out and electric because this is big and gruesome and shattered into tiny splintery pieces, caught under eyelids and sprinkled onto sheets so that it always itches, causes restless shifting, takes away the words in favor of physical discomfort.

i am trying to console him. i hold him and push his head to my chest and listen to breathing and eyelash flutter across my collarbone. i try to imagine what it must be like and get sad. and frustrated. because i can't understand.

in a little girl way my dad is still center of my universe. when i imagine the scene (recounted by mechanics. email and run-on sentences. scenery bottled up and pushed through tubes of telephone wire) i see my dad, seated. room dimmed. eyes closed. hopelessly tired. the very last second. the second after. and my heart splinters.

but his scene, the one he imagines, is much different. tongue pushed to roof of mouth to keep the sour words in. dreading what has come by way of u.s. mail.

it's bigger than the both of us and i don't know how to fix it.

i say i am sorry. i say i love you. i scratch his head and wipe the splinters from his face but there is still the staring at the ceiling, the blinking, the silence.

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