Dear Maya,

What makes an anniversary? For a while every moment was that moment again. Then it was the early morning sounds each day, the school bus passing, the birds chirping. Then every Friday was  a marker.  The 2nd of every month. Now the year looms like a heavy cloud. Fifty-two weeks. The next October 2nd. All of these mix in my mind with a heaviness, a dread I can only watch.

Of course they are all just markers in my mind. As the year approaches, it is clear that every moment is still that moment, every breath is that last breath. There is only now really, and my task is to live now.

I think so often of you Maya.  I consciously try to reframe how I recall you.  Not as the confused girl on that last day, that mistake you made, but as the sweet young person of the fifteen years before that.  Fifteen years. It is so hard to do this.  So hard to be with it all at once.  I just want you here again, yet I know…down that path is only more suffering.

Maya, I know you made a mistake, I still ponder the “something bigger”, still perseverate on “why”, but through it all I just love you. I don’t even know how that is possible.  How can I love this much?  I never knew I could. How can my love grow in your absence?  How can you be here more and yet not be here?  How we be so connected, when I cannot see your smile, touch your hand, laugh with you, cry with you, argue with you?

It is the great mystery for me now, Maya.  A mystery we will unravel together I suppose. Under these clouds, among these markers, we travel on.

Love you,

Dad

In the Woods, 2006

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