over the lookout, can't get down

Fred is curled up like a cat in my lap, his body vibrating with nervous energy at the exact frequency of my guilt. I haven't been very good about getting either of us out of the house lately, to walk, to play, to interact with other living creatures. (The fleas that occasionally hitch a ride in the nap of his fur when he runs out too poop -- that I hunt like a vengeful god and quash mercilessly between my fingernails -- don't count.) But my brand of misery just doesn't like company. And while I take a certain pride in operating against the common logic, or at least the cliche, it does tend to leave one to dwell in an ever-deepening pool of self-propagating filth and swill.

Everytime I think I've turned a corner.

My father is a mess. Or at least he was for most of my childhood and young adult life. For years, the man made a habit of setting sail on an ocean of clear spirits, while the women-folk in his life (mother, sister, wife and daughter) strained on tip toes, bodies pressed against the rails of the widow's walk waiting for the barest glimpse of his return. And he would come back eventually, a briney mess. Or sometimes inexplicably jaunty on his own two feet. While other times, of course, it was by gurney or police boat. And then there were the occasions in which we received notice to go retrieve the pieces of him we recognized: at the hospital, at the motel, from the jail. Thankfully, never the morgue. Luckily for him, my thumb is the exact shape of his and we could always use it as an identifier.

And then, of course, the ritual clean up. The gathering up of vodka bottles and pornography cleverly stashed under couch cushions and in the basement behind the water heater, the tossing of maggot inhabited cookware, the sweeping of broken glass and the unquestioning acceptance of eloquently penned, though shakily written, apologies. Exhausting, all of it. Even during the good. Maybe especially during the good, necks perennially sore from watching for shoe clouds. At least after the rain, you can bow your head.

Eventually my mother, for her own sanity, and our general safety, gave up the watch, (though never I think the love that kept her there as long as she was). She was the first off the platform and two of us couldn't blame her. (I'll let you guess who could.) If we're speaking technically, however, my aunt tried earlier. But even the convent's walls couldn't shield her from the patterns of duty imprinted on her psyche by her own mother, her mother who in her last hour still desperately grasped at wrist and shirtfront to pull her daughter close to demand, "Take care of my boy." The next morning we pried those self-same cold, dead hands from the metal of the watchtower.

My aunt and I walked down the rickety steps to solid earth together, I think. I don't remember when exactly, or how. We never mention it, but I think if you asked, she'd agree.

Free of her mother, her brother and the convent, she went on to marry a man who already had three children of his own when they met and so they compromised on Bichons and later it became evident that his grandchildren are most certainly and quite definitively, hers as well.

So all is.

Well.

And good.

And that has always made me happy.

And then, at some point, I went back up. Again, I'm not sure when or why. On some level, I feel it's where I am now.

Waiting. Waiting.

Waiting. For Godot.

For God.

Forgotten.

But I'm not sure for what.

No father for sure. For life, perhaps. For love. Though I'm not convinced I'd know the shape of either on the horizon, let alone in my hands.

And meanwhile, my father is better. Or so I hear. (Grand marshall in this parade. Best man in that wedding. VIP guest at the hockey game, the regatta.) "Kind of guy who can fall backwards into a pile of shit and come up with ham sandwich," my uncle, my aunt's husband, always says. And he is. And we laugh, though mostly from relief.

Now that he's better, sometimes I think I should write him. (He's written me. Letters in bottles from the island on which we all used to live. Hallmark, speaking for him, thinks highly of me, but I'm not sure where they're getting their information.) On the other hand, I feel the ghost daughter without a pen. And he without an email account. I know that in his mind I am still five-years-old, perfect and full of potential and I would hate for my vestigial, flawed handwriting to give anything away.