This week

This week I learned how you pronounce “extracurricular.” It made me laugh. You thought I was making fun of you, but I wasn’t. No, scratch that, I promised myself to be honest here. I think I was. I don’t know how you put up with me sometimes. I’ll be looking forward to you saying this word in the future. What if we have kids just so they have a lot of extracurricular activities we can talk about? I’m just kidding. (I really am.) We should have kids for different reasons.

“I thought a lot about whether I should give them to you or not. But I think she’d like that.”

This week I learned how to tell when you smile just to cover up something darker that eats you inside. But that part is easy. The hard part is I don’t yet know what to do with that. Will you help me figure it out?

The room was dark. Grandpa was lying on the bed that turned out to be both his first and his last. He was tired, quieter… smaller than I remembered him from all the time we spent together when I was growing up. But right there, in his eyes, in his voice, I could still recognize all that energy that has over time become a permanent part of me.

You don’t just start picking your nose twenty years into a relationship! It’s not fair. Or have you been hiding this all along? Either way, it’s disgusting. I can see you’re watching me writing this right now, but you don’t know yet there’s a big fight heading your way — right about now.

He pointed to a big box of little handwritten notes next to the bed. “She handed them to me very much like I’m giving them to you now. We all knew she didn’t have much left in her. The last round of chemotherapy did more bad than good. You must have been…” He tried to count the years for a while, but gave up. “Very little.”

“I don’t remember much of her,” I muttered, looking at the box.

“Go ahead, pick one.”

How come I learned you never watched “The Goonies” only this week? You’re a guy, for God’s sake. You should be the one writing this note. I’ve known you for so many years now and I’m sure I made tons of references to it. You laughed at those jokes. Were you just being condescending? Or are those jokes funny because it was me saying them?

“I always thought it was just a peculiar way she kept her journal. Every week she’d pick up a random scrap of paper and scribble something and throw it in a box.”

This week I realized I loved you… at the very moment I hated you most. Is there a way for me to describe it in a way that separates the one from the other? Probably not. I’ll write next week when I don’t feel like I want to strangle anyone who ever puts on a fucking love song. Any fucking love song. Unless I won’t ever write again. Today, it seems just as probable.

“Oh, don’t get me wrong.” He coughed. “I asked. Many times. She never told me what it was, until that night.”

That’s the funniest joke you can come up with? I don’t even want to repeat it here. We’ll be spending a lot of work on this in the future.

“She was writing about me. All along. Ever since she met me. Every single week since the day I first asked her out.”

Just a dash of cinammon. And I never had any idea!

He looked away for what seemed like a really long time.

“You know what that means? She never, ever allowed herself to get bored with me. Every week she looked at me like the week we met for the first time.”

This week I finally realized that I’ll never be able to convince you to what sometimes seems like a certainty to me — that going out with me all those years ago was the biggest mistake of your life.

“She told me to only start reading them after she was gone, once a week. I didn’t yet realize what that meant. How it allowed me to learn so many new things about her. To have her again, for a brief moment, every week. How much it…”

This time I couldn’t bear to look at him.

“…helped.”

I just learned what you meant when you said “I missed your body.” I want you… no, I need you to miss me more often in the future.

“I didn’t know it back then. My first question to her was the most stupid one you could imagine: But what if you’d outlived me?”

He shook his head.

“She smiled — God, she smiled — and told me just this: ‘I took my chances.’”

You’ve been such an asshole this week. What makes it worse is that I am sure you know exactly why. I think you misunderstood me more these past 24 hours than you understood me for the past 10 years. What happened?

Then he simply said, “Take them. I want you to remember us this way.”

I hoped you’d be a good father, but holy shit. I never suspected. Thank you.

That was it. He passed away a couple days after that conversation. I’ve been reading a new note, only one, every week since. Today, I want you to know, and I want to start reading them with you.

I haven’t learned anything about you this week. Nor last week. Nor many weeks before that. Not sure how many. I stopped counting long time ago. I feel the part of me that wants to stop writing is growing bigger and bigger every week. But I want to be with that other part, even though I know I will stop one day, and that realization makes me sadder more than anything else in my life.

But that day is not today.

I too am taking my chances.

Las Vegas, August 2010.