March 18th, 2014

Yesterday I remembered as I turned onto my street with my new car how my father and I would invent, when I was 11, communist conspiracy theories. All the cars with neon lights belonged to communists. The huge mirrored glass building on the way to church was a communist welcome center. I would giggle and giggle and at night on the way home from that same church, watch the lights from cars going the opposite way catch in the electric wires which blended into the dark pine trees so the light looked as if it were coming from the woods. I am very different now; I am more likely to be a communist than to make up stories about one. The moon is outside my room again and I don't know how it's already been a month since I wrote that last. Dad, I'm turning 30 in three days. My room still doesn't stay clean, I still say "yeah but", and I still wonder whether or not I'm beautiful every single day. But if you were here I would tell you how I've changed in other ways. I never even got to tell you how I left him and how much it hurt. I would ask you why we imagined communists in every shadow when I was 11 or how many times you read the book of Revelation and which chapter was your favorite. Month to month time collapses swiftly in, but this grief, it is a long mantle wrapping around and around me and I cannot find the end.