Catharsis

The sleepless nights on the road in the car next to my father, I didn't see it then but they were his way of dealing with that frantic restlessness. I have it too, sometimes when the silence gets too loud here I walk down to NYU and sit with Henry in one of his lectures. The pretty pony tails and hipster glasses are a forest for the trees in front of me, I imagine what it must be like to have a clear view of the rest of your life.

Kamikaze raindrops on the windows, everything out there reminds me of something. Where he kissed me, where he held my hand in his, where I felt that maybe I was nothing to him. When my father came to New York he had to leave almost instantly and move to Los Angeles and my mother. I know he always wanted to come back but he only got to do it once years later, with me.

When you said goodbye

It's one of those nights before the end of the world and everything's the same as it was. We wear our most dishonest smiles to disguise the heartbreak, we hold each other's hands and drink too much because it makes us forget tomorrow for a little while. Chloe a violin string on the sofa in the center of the room, Stephanie talking frantically about her upcoming adventures and me never telling her to stay because I'm afraid she'll say no.

And there we are at Newark in the early morning, three young women dressed in yesterday's silk and our hearts in uproar, lying and telling each other that everything will be alright. I'm good at leaving others but terrible at being left behind, it's always been that way. We watch her go and when we get out into the open winter air the birds have stopped singing.

Traces

I've never really talked to anyone about my father. Chloe knows because she was always there, Stephanie too, mother pretends it never happened. Whenever I feel like saying something I stumble on the fact that no words can ever describe what he meant to me, so I keep the memories hidden inside where no one can reach them. It's just easier that way.

The only one who ever came close is that boy I fell in love with just before it happened. When he finally came back to the house that night, that summer, Carl, his parents were shouting at me. Belle kept to her family, mother was at her hysterical bests and Stephanie cried like a baby. I looked at my father and through all the tears and agitated voices the expression on his face scared me more than anything else.

I sometimes see it when I close my eyes and in my dreams, but most of all I see it when I look at that black and white picture of my grandfather, my mother's father, taken in the middle of Moscow's Red Square sometime around 1970: its barely noticeable but impossible to ignore and it looks just like fear.

Everybody needs somebody

What I see in Chloe, Henry sees through me just by holding my hand over a restaurant table. To him I'm a book with an obvious ending, a Tom Clancy novel with one-dimensional characters and a simple plot for the masses. I wish I weren't so I tell him stories that aren't true about my past, about Los Angeles, about my father.

"He was a writer" I say, unconvincingly. He picks through his lamb chops, the light from the candles makes his skin look like pinkish rose petals. "What did he write about" he asks without making eye contact, I lie again and maybe he knows it.

We walk back through Washington Square Park, he stops me beneath the arch and holds me in his arms until I forget how cold it is. "Nothing is forever" he says, just like that. Fifth Avenue looks like an open wound over his shoulder and I wish I could believe he was wrong.

Keep your enemies close

An hour ago: Chloe comes home from work early, she's on the phone with someone. I'm in my room with my door closed, she throws her coat on the floor (I can hear by the sound it makes when it falls it's her Jil Sander), kicks off her shoes and stumbles on the words as she speaks. She's shaken up, "I'm not coming back" she says with a broken voice, then shuts her bedroom door behind her and throws herself on the bed.

Just now: her naked footsteps on the hallway marble, she picks up her coat, walks into the kitchen and leaves the water running for what seems like forever. She stops outside my room, I hold my breath and wait for her to knock but she never does. The silence is thicker than blood.