cold eyes.

I have always believed that to write about another person is by essence to make them more interesting. To pare things down by presuming about them this focal momentum as required in a narrative. The filmic nature of one's perspective. You forfeit so much in mundane detail in an effort to attain the sublime.

My father was a person to never wonder about his own character. In his absence, I find that this was the way about him on how he comported himself that made it so difficult for me to understand him. He became for me a mental bulwark in this regard, I guess. I think often about the interior life of my sister, for instance. Or my cousin. Even with my mother as of late I can sense a futile kind of thoughtfulness behind her demands. But it becomes a different sort of thought experiment when I try as much with my father. Even as he has passed with years between us, it all starts with how I remember his face, the way he said plainly how he felt and his expression remained inflexible. I could never once sense an affinity for him outside of what he spoke of: his work and family.

So often too I find myself in dialogue with my father, in my mind and during idle moments. Conversations never to transpire and not just for his passing but for the expansiveness I afforded him in my daydreams.

I imagine myself asking him many things. I imagine asking him about a brooch he once bought as a gift for my aunt, of what looked like a flowering aster. She wore it to the service, in fact. I imagine myself seated side-by-side. I imagine asking him what it means to live a good life, and how to be a good person. He would respond in my wanderings that it would be through the consistent effort of good deeds. He would tell me that you become a good person by practicing at it.