Vinyl.

I think of you when I remember staccato steps against a laminated walnut floor. I think of you when I remember tiny clouds of condensation left in my wake. I’m flat-footed, just like you, and I think, I wonder, if I’ll inherit your arthritis like how I inherited your eyes and your nose and your wit and your laugh. Like how you inherited it from Grandpa. And you love me the most because I remind you of him.

I guess we’re all aspiring to be just like our fathers.

I wonder, when I have a boy, if I’ll cherish the nuances that make him me, because they’ll make him you. I’ll look at his brows, how they frame his brown eyes, and see our shared reflection. Maybe by then I’ll be able to give him the love that I don’t know how to give you just yet. But I want to.

I want to write this book about you, just a little one. I want to write about days dancing with one another against speckled linoleum. Of white rice wrapped in banana leaves wrapped in your arms. Of dark skin in linen shorts and a love absent of boundaries that fuel my insecure attachment to men now.

I want to write about midday movies after kindergarten. Salty kernels, flannel chairs, saliva on my fingertips. How my sister still laughs out loud when I say you took me out of school to watch “Reindeer Games”. I don’t know a B from a D, but I know I love movies; our Rey matinees.

I want to write about how you told me not to write because, “That’ll never go anywhere.”, but when the lights went out on Christmas Eve I searched for a flashlight in your dresser only to find my poems instead.

I know my words have a destination. I know I love you. I know you’re not real but you’re all I know.

I want to write about you. To freeze my nostalgia. To make it my now. To keep my life, and us, suspended in balmy afternoons where you would look down and I would look up and say:

“You’re my favorite.” “I know, but tell me again.”

And we loop like that to the sound of static. To the scratchy voice symptomatic of a record so loved yet so unmaintained; its value not reflective of how we take care of it.

Her voice slows in my head. The record skips in my head.

This is all in my head.

And I know with each visit to this memory it will become more and more foggy. A gasoline infused haze that burns off by noon and becomes another thing about you I miss. Each time I see you you look old, not older. You look like Grandpa.

Maybe now you’ll love you, like I love you, like we love Grandpa. And rather than looking to our children as a conduit for our love, we can settle into our shared reflection and stop trying to see if there’s more to life than what we’ve got and ourselves.