August 2nd

Tomorrow is August 2nd.

You died on mom’s birthday. We joke about it now. That you chose to die on her birthday so that every year we’d celebrate mom on the 1st and visit you on the 2nd. Ironically it works out because every year I try to take mom somewhere nice for a few days and the last day is always reserved for you.

It’s been eight years.

I’ve written about you over a hundred times and I digress. I always digress. I start writing about something else entirely and you show up. You always show up.

Eight years. I still don’t know what to do with the number. It’s long enough that I should be used to it by now. I’m not. I’m just used to the not being used to it. There’s a difference. Grief doesn’t shrink. You just build your life around it until the life is bigger and the grief is the same size but the ratio changes and people call that healing.

There are things I want to tell you that don’t fit in an essay.

That I’ve been to Japan over a dozen times and then lived there for an entire year. The first few months were hard. I couldn’t understand why it was your favorite country or how you learned to speak the language so gently, in a voice I never heard you use in any other tongue. But I know now it was your first language. And the country where your first love was from.

You met him during the war. When the war ended he asked for your hand and you said no. Out of fear.

Twenty-five years later he came to find you. Both of you married. Both of you with children. Both of you divorced by then.

I think I understand now why you talked about Japan the way you did.

I’m trying to write a book about our family. I keep getting your voice wrong. Your voice only exists in a language I speak at seventy percent. The other thirty died with you.

I don’t visit your grave enough. I’m sorry about that. I talk to you in other places. In kitchens. In airports. In the back of a car when I’m tired and the city is blurring past and I’m doing the math on something and I can feel you over my shoulder. The way I used to feel you over my shoulder when I was eight and you were teaching me everything you’d learned in your lifetime. Your breath smelled like tea. Your hands were dry and warm. I have never felt that specific kind of safe since.

Eight years.

I have your gold. Your stubbornness. Your hands, I think. Or at least the way they move. I have the lockbox. The instinct to survive. I have a life you’d barely recognize and a woman inside it you’d know immediately.

I miss you the way I miss most things. Quietly. In the middle of an ordinary day when I’m not expecting it. A smell. A song. A door I lock with both hands.

Tomorrow is August 2nd. Mom and I will sit next to you for a while. Probably laugh as if you were there with us. Wishing you were there with us. And mom will probably ask you for the umpteenth time if I will ever marry and you won’t respond because you never answered questions you already knew the answer to.

And I’ll think of you. The way I always do. Not when I’m trying to. When I’m not.