#10 - Here and there and there and here

My job is to look through dozens of boxes of pictures and pick out the best ones for the funeral slide show. 1937 to present. That’s why she wanted me here. He’s not dead yet but the end is near. She’ll have so much to do, she says, so can she outsource this to me, sweetie. And while I’m here, can I go through the boxes of my junk they’ve kept in the attic. It’s too expensive to ship internationally, honey, or they would have offloaded it years ago.

So I sit in the garage sorting through the archive of my life and my dad’s life when I should be sitting inside talking to my dad. He doesn’t say much anymore, but I could sit with him. I think he’d like that. So many notes written in pink and purple swirly letters with flowers drawn around the edges. Notes from friends, sharing secrets in glitter pens. A diary from 1984 where I wrote at length about how much I wanted Mary Lou Retton’s haircut. Certificates of academic achievements, journalism articles, college acceptance letters, and hundreds of pictures of two little blonde girls smiling with their smiling mother.

The West to another West. Not a big enough leap to be allowed to comment, complain, or critique. I have the skin, the education, the class, and the language to squeeze in almost seamlessly. I’m only missing the accent, the only thing that gives me away. Externally, I’ve assimilated. Do I get a prize?

I don’t miss people. I miss sitting on a cement bench on the beach path between Redondo Pier and Palos Verdes. On the walk back home, I need to walk past the pier where my dad and I used to get ice cream. I need to drive down Del Amo and make a left on Hawthorne. I need to feel the stillness of the air. The lack of wind. A stillness and warmth I never noticed before but now find almost suffocating. But I want to be encased in it. I want to not be able to breathe so I can finally breathe. I want to sit on that cement bench, curl my knees into my chest, and finally be.

I lie in bed, the same room as the day I came home from the hospital, I’m told, but a bigger bed now. My gymnastics medals and dance pictures in boxes in the attic above me, but I see them on the walls. Smiling faces of teenage girls’ arms wrapped around each other. Thinking they were going to be Supreme Court Justices, actresses, and happy wives. Puffy-painted jewellery boxes. Relics of another world.