Where he ends I begin, 1.
1.
At my father's funeral, I met a version of him I'd never seen before.
A black-and-white photo of him at 21, trapped in stillness.
Younger than I am now.
And somehow, looking at that face, the weight of life— its meaning, its absurdity— pressed down on me with no language to contain it.
Who was I?,
this daughter who didn’t even exist back then,
whose existence wasn’t even a probability?
The man who had been my father in life had now returned to being just a man—
a body, a vessel that once carried a life.
He was no longer "Dad."
He had slipped through that identity and become part of a much larger story.
And with that realization came sorrow, and guilt, and something I didn’t expect: a sharp compassion.
I thought of how little of his real self he’d ever shown to his own daughter.
A life spent hidden behind roles, expectations, noise.
No photo could capture him.
No memory could define him.
He was liquid— constantly moving, shifting, becoming.
My father, my mother’s husband, my stepmother’s man, a brother, a son, a storm, a stranger.
He was always becoming something else.
Until, at some point, he stopped.
The movement ceased.
The ocean stilled.
He turned into ice.
A block of him remained— cold and heavy.
But no one—not even those closest to him— could ever know the full temperature of his waters.
Nothing alive can remain still.
Life is a constant reshaping.
We are smoothed, broken, pushed, flooded, split apart, and reformed.
Stability is not life.
Life is motion.
