I'm in LA now, escaping for a minute from the frozen over east coast. I still can't believe you went to UCLA at some point, lived here for a time. How long was it? Not very long, I don't think. Whatever shenanigans you were up to those days seem to have kept you on the move.
On my way to the airport the other day, I thought with a jolt about how no one had asked me for my itinerary. You insisted I send you an itinerary for every trip I went on - flight, hotel info, phone numbers and emails of who I was traveling with or who I was visiting. This continued throughout my adult life, and since I would usually either forget to send something or have no idea what to send (as in, well, I'll be trekking across the mountains in Peru so there isn't really a hotel address I can send, or I'm traveling alone and have no idea where I will be staying), you would always send reminder emails, texts, or voicemails. "Itinerary please" is all they would say.
You were efficient and to the point in your electronic or voicemail communication. I remember one night in the hospital you thought your friend Tony was coming to visit, but it was getting late and you wanted to go to sleep, so you wanted to check with him on his plan. I took out your phone and said I would text him. I started to compose a long message "Hi Tony, it's Amy using my Dad's phone, we just wanted to see if you were going to come tonight, no problem if not but if you are can you tell us --" and you interrupted "what are you writing?" and I said well what do you want me to write? You said "E.T.A., question mark". And I laughed at the difference in our communication styles.
Well, no one asked for my flight details, car rental information, or phones and addresses of all of my friends in LA this time. I wouldn't have forgotten to send it, if you had asked. It's weird, it's sort of like you're less gone when I'm out of New York. Right after you died, the first time I drove back into Brooklyn it hit like a sledge hammer. Something about being back in the city made me suddenly and violently aware that you were gone. I thought, I'm in Brooklyn and I don't have a dad, I don't have a dad. But now that I'm in LA I think you're just at home with Mom in Port Jeff. I know you're not, but it doesn't seem that way.
This whole process, I don't think it's going to ever make sense. I don't think there is ever going to be a time that it will be real what happened, that you will actually be gone. It's just a lot of back and forth between thinking about it consciously and not thinking about it consciously, and time keeps flowing on and the more time that passes the more it becomes solidified into fact, like sediment, this idea that you died. But it still seems just as absurd and untrue as it did two months ago, and people say "I'm sorry that your dad died" and I say yes, thank you, but inside I'm still thinking what are you talking about, that is just so wildly untrue. But now it's "oh, my Dad died a few months ago" which just sounds like something that happened. To other people, it's just a thing that occurred. But that's not how it feels to me, it's still THE thing that occurred, the everything that clouds all my life now. Two months sounds like an amount of time that has passed, but it's never been so minuscule, this amount of time. When it happened, right when you died, I said, okay, how long is this going to last? A year? What can I expect here, a year of grieving? I needed a timeline. It's only now that I'm starting to understand that it really will last forever. You will always be gone and in a way I will always be grieving, and I will never think it sounds right when someone says that you died however long ago. We just have to go along with what is allegedly fact, what has had so much water flow over it that it's turned into sedimentary rock.
I love you and miss you. I'm staying with Susan, in West Hollywood, then at a hotel in Joshua Tree. I'll text you her phone number and send you the address for the hotel.
a
On my way to the airport the other day, I thought with a jolt about how no one had asked me for my itinerary. You insisted I send you an itinerary for every trip I went on - flight, hotel info, phone numbers and emails of who I was traveling with or who I was visiting. This continued throughout my adult life, and since I would usually either forget to send something or have no idea what to send (as in, well, I'll be trekking across the mountains in Peru so there isn't really a hotel address I can send, or I'm traveling alone and have no idea where I will be staying), you would always send reminder emails, texts, or voicemails. "Itinerary please" is all they would say.
You were efficient and to the point in your electronic or voicemail communication. I remember one night in the hospital you thought your friend Tony was coming to visit, but it was getting late and you wanted to go to sleep, so you wanted to check with him on his plan. I took out your phone and said I would text him. I started to compose a long message "Hi Tony, it's Amy using my Dad's phone, we just wanted to see if you were going to come tonight, no problem if not but if you are can you tell us --" and you interrupted "what are you writing?" and I said well what do you want me to write? You said "E.T.A., question mark". And I laughed at the difference in our communication styles.
Well, no one asked for my flight details, car rental information, or phones and addresses of all of my friends in LA this time. I wouldn't have forgotten to send it, if you had asked. It's weird, it's sort of like you're less gone when I'm out of New York. Right after you died, the first time I drove back into Brooklyn it hit like a sledge hammer. Something about being back in the city made me suddenly and violently aware that you were gone. I thought, I'm in Brooklyn and I don't have a dad, I don't have a dad. But now that I'm in LA I think you're just at home with Mom in Port Jeff. I know you're not, but it doesn't seem that way.
This whole process, I don't think it's going to ever make sense. I don't think there is ever going to be a time that it will be real what happened, that you will actually be gone. It's just a lot of back and forth between thinking about it consciously and not thinking about it consciously, and time keeps flowing on and the more time that passes the more it becomes solidified into fact, like sediment, this idea that you died. But it still seems just as absurd and untrue as it did two months ago, and people say "I'm sorry that your dad died" and I say yes, thank you, but inside I'm still thinking what are you talking about, that is just so wildly untrue. But now it's "oh, my Dad died a few months ago" which just sounds like something that happened. To other people, it's just a thing that occurred. But that's not how it feels to me, it's still THE thing that occurred, the everything that clouds all my life now. Two months sounds like an amount of time that has passed, but it's never been so minuscule, this amount of time. When it happened, right when you died, I said, okay, how long is this going to last? A year? What can I expect here, a year of grieving? I needed a timeline. It's only now that I'm starting to understand that it really will last forever. You will always be gone and in a way I will always be grieving, and I will never think it sounds right when someone says that you died however long ago. We just have to go along with what is allegedly fact, what has had so much water flow over it that it's turned into sedimentary rock.
I love you and miss you. I'm staying with Susan, in West Hollywood, then at a hotel in Joshua Tree. I'll text you her phone number and send you the address for the hotel.
a
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