Here is where things get current

A fish dies in the summer

I try to write about him, but I’m afraid I don’t remember much.

I’m afraid, in the British way of apologising.

I’m afraid, in the American way of how we wake up.

(We wake up with our hand on our heart.)

Here is what I can remember. Be careful, his blood sugar is low.

They said the same about me.

Tan skin. Mediterranean. The story was that he worked on a farm up in Washington one summer and his skin got so tan it stayed that way. Soon after he got himself an apartment, I fell asleep on Stinson Beach and woke up with the back of my left calf covered in his freckles. And then there’s my birth mark on that same left leg. He had one too. It’s his.

Did he?

I don’t remember.

The left side of the body belongs to our mothers.

There’s a parking lot at the Corte Madera mall. There’s a Book Passages there, and an REI, and a T-Mobile shop. And when I was 17, and going to get an American phone for the summer, I saw him driving through that parking lot in his green mini. And he waved at me. In a script it would say -

Awkward beat. He waves, reluctantly.

That I remember, that is true.

Who was I with?

I regret to remember that troubling chapter in our family history. On a call home, I learn that he would sit outside with her in her rose garden to talk about his relationship to God. He called her his spiritual advisor.

I email him a link to her obituary, six paragraphs in the Marin Independent Journal.

He doesn’t respond.

Here is where things get current.

As a fire rips through two corners of Los Angeles, he looks at my Linkedin.

Here is where things get current.

He appears faceless in my dreams, limbless on the reformer.

Here is where things get current.

A fish in Northern Italy dies, flopping on the hot cobblestones of his small village piazza. I imagine a wet branzino for dinner. He stands, holding the dead fish. He knows that this is how we will end.

He gets into his bed alone on top of his mountain. He turns off his lights. He takes an over-the-counter sleeping pill he brought back from his last trip to America.

He closes his eyes.

He backs his car out of that spot in the Corte Madera mall.

He drives by his kid again in the parking lot.