Velvet Verbosity

It is 1976 and my white hair falls well below my shoulders, skimming the floor and picking up dust when I lean under the bed to pull out the photo album. I run the pads of my fingertips over the front of the album, across the face of the foal pictured there. At 6, I’m a natural at wistful longing.

Inside are three pages of photos spanning a decade or so. In one, he leans coolly against a car, not smiling, but soberly penetrating the lens of the camera. This picture I took from a box of photos belonging to my mother and I imagined it was taken during their “dating” pre-baby years. In another, he is younger still, dressed in a military uniform. I retrieved this one from the same box and I know this was taken before my mother. She knew him after he was in the navy. That much I knew…that much and little else.

I stare for long moments, look into his eyes and try to figure out who he was, where he could be now, and why he didn’t love me enough to stick around and see me through childhood. I hated and longed for him simultaneously, the hate playing a much smaller part because it was dangerous to be too angry. What if there was a good reason? What if something had happened to him? No, it wasn’t ok to hate him. At 6, I knew that too.

I fantasized about him knocking on my door and scooping me up with a big smile, clamping me with strong arms and assuring me he never ever would have stayed away so long if he hadn’t been lost at sea, his pockets full of the letters he couldn’t send. I strain over the photos in the album, some fading, trying to piece together who this man was, my father, trying to remember his voice, his smell, his laugh. I remember nothing of those things, though I paint my own picture of him in my mind, glued together from the photos on the page.

(image: http://www.garderisettes.fr/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=57)

From The Pillowbook:

“We two remake our world by naming it together, knowing what words mean for us and for the others for whom current coin is cold speech - but we say, the tree, the pool, and see the fire in air, the sun, our sun, anybody’s sun, the world’s sun, but here, now, particularly our sun…”

What is the “future”?

From Wikipedia.org: “In a linear conception of time, the future is the portion of the timeline that has yet to occur, i.e. the place in space-time where lie all events that still have not occurred. In this sense the future is opposed to the past (the set of moments and events that have already occurred) and the present (the set of events that are occurring now).”

The future is unknown, unwritten. A plane of infinite possibilities recommended by the now. Each event builds upon the first to write the future. We can’t know it, and any discussion of it is no more than fanciful theory. Five minutes from now I could die in a freak accident or from an undetected bloodclot wedged into my brain, or I could discover a disease that will irrevocably alter my path. Or, we could kiss, and what future would that write?

(Image: “The Unfolding”, Oil on Canvas by Rassouli.
http://www.rassouli.com/occult.htm)