is it because I remind you of him

is that where the responses and explanations and accusations to things i never said and rarely think come from? Projections onto me of a person who never listened to you, in hopes that maybe through my ears that look so like his, he will finally hear you and who you really are. In hopes that someone will recognize you for the woman you are, not a role-playing mother or grandmother or coworker, but a full person with dreams and hopes and ideas and ideals. Longing for recognition but following your cultural sensibilities in denying the wish, so as to deny the disappointment.

You have your memories; I have mine. I know the truth, but my heart cannot believe my brain and indict him. My heart is wrapped in his love and always will be. I'm sorry that I grew up like this but that's just it; you weren't there to fill up that space in my jello-mold child-heart.

begin a good person

I meant to type "being," but begin came out and seems more fitting. When will I be satisfied? Most days, the majority of days, almost every day I am satisfied and happy with my life. But some days feel off. These days feel off. Everything feels... off. This isn't where I want to be; this isn't what my life should look like. I want to be a good person. By that I don't mean good for society, good for other people, good for the world. I mean I want to be a better me, I want to be as good as I can be, I want to push myself and I want to struggle to feel alive. I want to be better; I always want to be better. I can be better. I can be stronger, faster, smarter, more efficient. I can also be more emotionally attuned to myself and others, more considerate, less selfish, more giving. But really, what's more important to me is to be more engaged, more respectful, more respected. I can be and I want to be more.

My life is moving too fast and your death was so soon

It's been just about two months now since my father passed away and I have been okay. I've been myself with strangers, broken down a little bit but not a lot with my friends, and been a pretty damn good daughter/aunt/sister to my family. I want to be selfish and I know it's alright for me to be so, to selfishly mourn and grieve and focus on my own pain, but I can't. It's not there. Sadness flutters through me like hummingbirds rather than like a bullet train through my heart as it did with the last death. I think of the funeral picture and how contrived it felt, how contrived the entire funeral felt, and I struggle to keep in my mind the picture I carry of him in my head, walking out a doorway and turning to see me, the light of my daddy's life, and a smile filling out his entire face all the way to his bushy eyebrows and round happy chin.

I was so angry about my siblings saying "we have to learn from this, we have to keep in touch more." Screw that! You should have learned when he was alive, not after his death! What the hell is the use of all your after-the-fact repentance when you never called him to say hello? Who were all you people at the funeral and why haven't I seen you over the past several years of loneliness and isolation? You don't deserve to "learn a lesson" from someone's death. No death is worth "a lesson" to some cheap faker who pretends to themselves that they care about someone for their entire life, only to realize that the self-lie has been a truth the whole time and all they needed was to be more genuine. You just had to genuinely love and care for someone WHEN THEY WERE ALIVE is that so hard?! I don't want you to learn a lesson from this, and I sure as hell don't want to learn anything. I learned everything I needed to know from my father, from my father himself when he was alive. He left me nothing to learn after he died, and I'll stick with his wishes.

Anyway. My life moves on. But it's not that interesting.

I sent you my heart

in a little folded packet of words, traveling across the country at a speed unimaginable even to the daylight dreamer. What did you do when you received it, which I know you did? Did you carefully unfold each little crease and crinkle, knowing that hidden in the wrinkles was my love? Or did you, so eager to see the message inside, ignore the packaging and focus only on the darkness of the words themselves without understanding what lay behind and beneath and between the lines? Certainly in the darkest of times we need the brightest of lights to guide our ways, or even a hint or memory of these lights of love. So I sent my light to you to help me with each turn on this teetering walkway crumbling beneath and behind and between my steps, but if you don't shine it back to me, I will be lost. I sent you my heart; I need it back.

Yay food network

So Brian tells me to write, which adds another person to the list of people who have told me to write (mentioned earlier, therapist et al), but rather than focus on the words or message or prettiness I should just pull out a stream of consciousness thing here. But what do I say... there's too much and too little to say. It's not quite real yet, and it won't be until I see him, actually see him in the suit he wore to my brother's wedding, see him lying motionless and still never to take another breath, see him in the casket my brother and I spent a half hour choosing versus the "chancellor" or "embry cherry" or "ambassador" except maybe I think this casket is the "ambassador" one of "solid African mahogany" which explains why it costs as much as all of my life savings. I guess I'm only 22 so it makes sense that I don't have too many savings. The casket is "ambassador"... there's an obvious and sick ironic statement I could make here; I could also avoid that very modern-American-writing thing and just say something literally rather than ironically.

I could also avoid all of this and continue watching "24 Hour Restaurant".

Conversation with my father

See, this is the basis of the book in my dreams. This post is the equivalent of scratch work, like a rough rough draft. My math scratch work is just a bunch of numbers vertically, with some equations and thoughts and many question marks and capitalized words stretching diagonally across the page, hoping to head toward a solution. Generally I number my scratch work pages in hopes of finding some sort of narrative thread between all of them, and this thread is in fact the solution, more or less. With some editing. So here goes the scratch.

My father just said to me that I am the first person he has told his life story to, and we only had a one hour conversation. My father entered the war in 1965. Today is July 10, 2010. It has taken him 45 years, two wives, five children, and three grandchildren to find someone to talk to. And there's so much to say. Here's another quote. "Our conversation as 90% me and only 10% you. But you talked about knowledge, and I talked about... memories." These words do not convey what I want them to say, and that is because it's too difficult for me to translate both my emotions and the Vietnamese onto the page. Generally I can handle my own life and walk it into ink, but even with French I find it hard to transfer the emotions. For instance, in our conversation I kept trying to say 'a mon avis' and I couldn't figure out how to say that in either English or Vietnamese. Anyway.

My paternal grandfather died when my father was a baby. He was buried on the other side of a war zone, and my father and his mother could not visit his grave. In fact, the first time my father visited his birth father's grave was in 2004, when he first visited Vietnam with my two elder brothers with the same name. This is old news.

My grandmother remarried (also, she died last year and no one bothered to tell me for weeks) and had five more children. Dad ended up caring for the first three as they grew older, as his stepfather was at work and his mother was busy rearing babies. He had three stories about his three siblings. Watermelon, being sick, and calling your kindergarten teacher a bitch.

He was in the air force for 12 years. Enlisted when he was 20, in 1963, entered the war at 22 in 1965. Married in 1967, had my older sister in 1968. My oldest brother in 1969. Left Vietnam in 1975. Three stories of almost dying. One, the short runway. Two, the commercial flight. Three, the mid-air near-collision. A lot of bamboo.

In 1975, met my mother in Minnesota. Married in 1976. Had a child in 1977, named after his dead son left in Vietnam. Had another son in 1983. A daughter in 1988 (that's me!). When did he find out that my half-siblings were still alive? Not before I was born, certainly. I met my half-brother, I remember it so clearly. I was in my room, which means my oldest brother had gone to college already. So I was at least seven years old. A nice man made me an origami flower and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. That's it really.

Everything I wrote earlier, about our insignificance and how it's hard for me to take my life, my problems and my sufferings seriously? Straight out of Dad's book. Because he has actual problems, but they're nothing compared to some other peoples'. And nothing compared to our places in the universe.

Therapy

Sometimes when I strolled into the student mental health offices I was sure that nothing was wrong with me, that I had come here just out of some weird fluke in the previous weeks, that I was fully capable of dealing with life's hurdles without regularly falling to pieces. My cheery outlook was always evident in the usual preliminary questions, how was your week are you keeping up with schoolwork are you sleeping alright. And then the therapist would ask how my parents were doing.

If you want to see me cry, you just need to ask me sincerely how my parents are doing. Or more specifically, how my father is doing. Ask about what he does with his day-to-day life, inquire about what makes him happy, tell me you hope his health is holding up. Just thinking about him nowadays brings tears to my eyes. I'll probably smile and blandly murmur something about how he's alright, he has a few grandkids now, he gets sick sometimes but that happens when your'e older. Push me a little bit and I'll break down. His days are spent in the two rooms of our apartment, either sitting on the futon staring at the muted television or lying on the bed staring vacantly at the ceiling. Nothing seems to make him happy, but then again, few things ever did. According to him, opening the refridgerator makes him sick, wearing anything less than full Minnesota winter gear on a trip to the grocery store here in sunny Southern California makes him sick, and if I open the front door too quickly, the slight gust of wind will make him sick.

It's not so much the old-man grumbling that gets to me, it's the fear that lies behind it all. He's afraid to leave those two small rooms, afraid to venture outside, afraid to talk to people. I've seen him stumble through ordering a meal at Boston Market and get angry at himself for the rest of the day for not handling it well. He doesn't answer the house phone, ever. I ask my parents why they even have a house phone if they never answer it, but they claim it's for emergencies. It's very evident why he chose to commit himself a few weeks ago, as anyone would go a little crazy from spending all day everyday in a tiny apartment with few distractions for months on end.

I can see two reasonable options here, neither of which will actually occur. One, I stay home from graduate school for an indeterminate amount of time, spending most of my days with Dad and giving him a social vent, hence helping his general mental health. I can also persuade him far better than any other family member to get outside and do things, like visit his grandchild. But I and everyone else in my family knwos that I won't do this. Two, I somehow find a nursing home with a Vietnamese translator that I and Mom approve of. This will also not happen. This is something that everyone deals with, but normally it's when they're in their 40s, not in their 20s. Boo-hoo life is so unfair. Boo-hoo why do these things happen to me, boo-hoo I am so special and alone and significant in my troubles.

This is why I struggled so much in therapy. Because yes, these are legitimate issues. My father is aging and someone needs to take care of him. But I cannot acknowledge the seriousness of this issue in my life, since my little life seems so insignificant to me. All these words, all this sound and fury, for nought. All my plans, options, worries... they disappear when I think about, well, anything at all. I can't take my own life seriously. Because it's just, well, mere existence.