Still grieving after nearly 20 years...

I can hardly believe you’ve been gone for twenty years. Already? Where did the time go? The grief I can accurately calculate, the echo of which reverberates throughout my life, going away in tumultuous waves only to return when I least expect it. I would say I have accomplished little, but I know that is only your mother’s voice jonesing in my head for a perfect WASP life I wasn’t able to live due to my abhorrence to deceit.

 I can’t remember your laugh, or your voice, they are mere whispers on the breeze from a long ago memory, catching my ear like laughter from a playground far down the hill. Your eyes I cannot forget, they haunt me from the mirror whenever I view my reflection, your eyes, your father’s eyes, surrounded by his creases, the man with which you never gave me clue to his identity. I am unaware as to whether the fact that a child intuitively knows their father by a connection of soul is a good or bad thing, at times I feel peace in the knowing and at other times I feel torture in it.

You manifest rarely in my dreams, only as something behind a veil I can no longer touch, but desperately seek answers from. Even as a memory you are honored, a thought, a conscience as I traverse, apparently you made an impression and I am the better man for it.

The epic ‘what if?’, I’ve managed to convince myself that part of my soul has lived or will live in a world where you don’t die until I’m well into my 40s or 50s. I’m not sure which reality would be more interesting or easier, but I sure wish you’d call sometime and let me know, wouldn’t that be interesting?

I’ve lifted you up, and I’ve demonized you, now I can finally just see you as a person. Maybe that’s what they mean when people say ‘someday you’ll understand’. I understand, but I don’t seem to be the better for it, instead development is still arrested, and I wonder if I’ll ever grow.

I wonder what you think of me, and sometimes that thought completely submerges me in concrete; a judgment from a far away consciousness, even now I think that’s absurd, but that doesn’t seem to chip away the cement shoes.

Grief hits me like a glass panel in the middle of the street. I can see right through it until it’s crashing into my face and tiny splinters dig into my skin and I’m powerless against the onslaught. Even at this very moment I’m trying to radically accept it, but my ID is screaming “it’s not fair!”. And there in lies the rub right, because it isn’t fair. Am I supposed to radically accept that? Well yea I guess so.

If you suddently appeared I imagine I’d lovingly take you into my arms, there would be no awkwardness or shyness. I guess that means that I love you and miss you still. Not every day is like this, but when these days come the lack of a mother makes the world seem colder, even on bright sun shiny days.