Etched

We all got to talking about photographs and family. I mentioned that there are almost no photographs of my father and me. There's no grim reason for it, no dysfunction or avoidance, just an oversight of opportunity, just us not being there when the camera was, too.

There is one.

It is me, my father and my mother at my first rehearsal dinner. We are at a restaurant in Cambridge that closed not long after we were there. We are smiling and nicely dressed, the translucent tubes snaking over my father's shoulders and below his nostrils the only subtle hint that something isn't quite right.

We are smiling because we believe I am just a few days from being happy. We are smiling because although we know he isn't well, and hasn't been for some time, we don't know that he is just three months away from death.

Aisling

In the dream we tried to speak across the span of three decades and found, to no one's surprise, that we had nothing to say, the lack of conversation filling the line with lengthy white-sound pauses.

I rarely dream of people.

Maybe it came from driving through the center of your old hometown, passing the school where I spent a summer spinning vinyl under a pseudonym, past the place where you got me my first job, the one I lost because I didn't know steamers were still alive and I couldn't bring myself to stick my hands in the bucket while they hissed because I was certain, somehow, that they would attack en masse and attach themselves to me.

The boss said, "I don't think you're right for this."

It wouldn't be the last time I heard that.

I worry when I dream of people. Because I usually don't. So this is to say, be well.