Today was a Good Day

Today was a good day.

      A belated spring came to my beloved Hilltop. I slept in after I closed the library last night.

A job called back.

An editor returned my email.

A heated text to my ex didn’t send by electronic failure and I had a chance to think better of it.

I returned to another of my jobs.

I have three.

I’m back at two.

I prepared for a long night at the library. I stirred my hot chocolate into my instant coffee.

Stopped.

I drank these every morning in Anchorage. I woke with golden rays of finite mid-morning sun streamed in through the window. I traded the mountains for this, for a view of a slushy street and Kriner’s Diner to be closer to my father. I walked from my room in the hostel to the kitchen down the hall. I would microwave my water in a big white cappuccino mug, add a slim packet of coffee and scoop of white hot chocolate powder, stirred with thin coconut pastry from the New Saya market. Poor man’s mocha. Everything about that place, down to the stirrer in my drink --impermanent. Breakfast in purgatory. Then I walked across the hall to my father’s room and knocked, waited for him to shuffle to the door and let me in.

I don’t know if I should drink it or not. Each sip opens a sensory memory of Alaska. Of my father. Of his little room in purgatory. It is in that little room he died, as if falling asleep.

Love is leaving before it is even leaving.

As he died in Alaska I went out to reclaim all of the places my ex-girlfriend and I went in Iowa City; The Englert, the Hamburg Inn, Studio 13. I sat in these places alone. I meant to talk to people but instead I mostly watched the routines of a Saturday night unfold before me. Women with their silhouettes lit, pulling their girlfriends onto the dance floor. We once belonged with the lovers, oblivious to everything around us.

You must, her best friend said, really love her.

I hadn’t said it yet, but I do. Mel said in October.  

It echoes as if I can see the apparitions of ourselves in everyone else. Now she hasn’t offered so much as her condolences over the loss of my father in a text message. I want so badly for her to tell me

Anything.

I’m a good daughter.

I did all I could.

She knew how much I loved him.

I don’t know if her leaving makes me thinks she’s the most credible source because she knows the worst parts of me, because nobody else walked out. Maybe she knows something they can’t see. She validates the worst fear, that I am unlovable. I’m cracked in places that cannot be sealed. I’m not cut out for this settled life. I am destined to remain unrooted, a seed on the wind.

My home is filled with condolence cards, flowers, and food. I cannot get over one woman leaving. She is missing from the arrangement of daffodils. I know I made a poor choice from the beginning, I picked a little bit of sunlight to get me through the long winter.

And she was fun.

Did you pursue her in the dimly lit dive bar

where a queen with glitter lips dropped a line

as subtle as her equally glittered tits that you were her age and single?

Did you sort of plant that queen?

October. Late night at a Ranger’s game in Cedar Rapids. This is the first weekend I’ll spend at her place Iowa City. I look back at that night and this apparition of myself  heading towards so much pain that isn’t her fault. How strong the pull of a new romance, rushing to my head faster than the alcohol. I want to yell she’s the wrong woman, get out. But, I know I wouldn’t listen, propelled the force of a fast romance. For months we couldn’t sit through a movie or T.V. show. Every spare moment we pressed skin against skin, as if we could push hard enough to merge seamlessly into one. This obsessive energy of new love. I learned again how not to sleep alone.

Mel  joked I’m going to die alone, because she’s a lesbian who is allergic to cats.

I think about my father asleep in his little room. His labored breathing. His falling into a death as easy as sleep. I want to go back and say, maybe we all die alone. Or maybe only the very lucky find someone able to support a heavy heart. Or maybe death is a highly personal process that is different for everybody. Maybe the thought we are consumed with in our final moments is of us. The self in it’s final moment of being.

I love like my father—recklessly with emotions that are sometimes too big for my body. This heart falls in love too easily. Falls apart too easily. But I flew to Alaska on Christmas Eve to see him for the last time. I love too big, but I got to spend a Christmas and a Father’s Day with my dad because of this big love, because I fall in love with things about to break.