Annum

It has been a year since my father and I last spoke. I’ve felt the loom of this particular anniversary for some time now, although the worst moment has already passed. He wasn’t there when I needed him; beyond this, there is little to say.

In lieu of saying it, I have made several forays into the archives and am amazed at how inexorably, in retrospect, our relationship declined. Reading backwards, my posts about my father are eerily like a motion study, in which each small movement away from each other has been meticulously documented and preserved. In aggregate, they furnish some understanding of the process, if not nearly enough.

Through the lens of distance that writing affords, I can see my father as a character so consumed by disappointment that he has abandoned every vestige of his past; at a remove from my own disappointments, I feel empathy for him. But empathy is not the same thing as reconciliation, which I know better than to expect and am not quite certain I want. Thus, the line in the sand remains drawn.

Instead, I think about this anniversary as an unmooring, and notice that it coincides with a full moon eclipse. Endings, then, but beginnings too, ones that I will embark upon without him.

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