November 8th, 2022, Columbia, Missouri.
My first-born will turn seventeen next week. He is a boy who looks just like his father, indigenous features kept untouched by my whiteness except for his hair, which falls soft and brown on his brow these days, to be brushed aside and don’t you mind it in your eyes, Dylan? Not his father’s deep-black hair, the Inca ancestors, more like the hazel hair of my youth, but his brown eyes, yes, and skin so dark in the summer, up to the rim of his lifeguard work shorts and shirt which hide a paleness that feels incongruous.
One day when he and his younger brother by one year were tweens we went to a lake outside of town with friends, and I took pictures of Dylan in the spring waters, by himself; he looked like he was one with the waters. He has worked as a lifeguard since he could legally work, and if he has lost the boyishness in that photograph it does not feel like it to me.
It is fall in Missouri. Oscillating between summer and winter in the span of a day, the weather carries a light that caresses instead of vanquish. I live for light, the way it sculpts the image of the world on the retina, and the pictures we take of the world. It is fall and I have been looking for a job and I have not not found one, the season a mocking mirror of the trajectory of my still-borne career. The leaves crack and I see the decomposition needed for a successful compost, I see the beauty of their veins and patterns and colors and it staggers me, and makes me stop. I stop. I should stop longer and take the time to meditate. It was lifesaving during the years of heartbreak and self-inflicted darkness, the discipline of breathing consciously, of circling back to what it takes to take a picture, that stillness when all is ever changing.
The waste of joy in those lost years feels like an insult now, looking back at the kids, the gift of them there then gone, the time with them I didn’t always savor, because I didn’t know how to. But now. Dylan turns seventeen next week and his being is still a wonder.
I am writing this at a cafe downtown, looking out the window onto the busy main street, and as I typed “wonder” and looked up, a beautiful woman with long white hair worn in a loose, wide ponytail, dressed in neutral-tone clothes flowing around her (or was it?) walked slid by and barely turned to look at me as she did and she was gone.
