Chelsea Leigh Trescott

The female voice: -That night my father walked into an empty home, and the usual voice did not yell to keep going. He had no urge, no distraction. He felt the merry-go-round simply come to a halt. The moment was clear and honest and overwhelming. At one point, he will tell me the merry-go-round is not important.

It is an image that crushes me. -I must have believed we could all survive with a bit of naivenessand also, restraint.

For instance, that to support a sister was to maintain her illusion in front of the family.

Was to soften reality so our parents could be kept proud.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott

By all means, I learned that we must buy ourselves time but appear busy. -On similar terms, I took a cruise around Bora Bora so I could miss my then-boyfriend rather than claim my loss.

And even there, with the crystal waters and the tremendous distance, I never let myself escape entirely. Though vacations assume a certain ambition to; it is a choice, I think, not to forget what has been intentionally left behind.

After dinner when the stars filled up the sky and people sat out on the boat deck, a world that was less finite could not be pictured. But this was not what I saw. Though what I think I will find is I never gave it my best effort. I stayed back and began to lay out a photo-album, a gift I would give him when I

Chelsea Leigh Trescott

returned. I guess I was trying, in a way, to settle things. To put a vision back together.

Maybe the trouble is I have never been too careless or too committed either. Even when the boat had docked and the halls were quiet, I started thinking that would be a good time to stay in also, to concentrate on the captions in my cabin on a cot. Nothing was less romantic than the difficulty that consumed me in Bora Bora, or more shameful. I couldnt determine whether the tone should play off the images: was the album a gift or saying goodbye?

Its possible, at some point, I got into trusting that more time could save a couple, or at least would recover a womans strength. What I have often wondered is whether a man has contemplated a similar method. I worry that they do. That they hide everything beneath a gloss of silence. That thats where

Chelsea Leigh Trescott

their most immediate reactions pile up. I wonder if that isnt where they betray us.

Where they protect what is most interesting.

In a letter, my father will call it the trappings of life.

And he will say that some day soon life will bring me a career, success, a husband, and a familyand he will ask me to trust him.

You want these trappings and I want them for you, but you may not feel fully at peace until you get to know who your Father is.

In a way, this will always make me flinch.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott

Because it is honest and clear and shameful and it will be a lesson but one I am not ready to be challenged by.

Though maybe it has always been too nave to imagine a time when we are truly ready, truly prepared not to be crushed.

I do not know.

How does a daughter begin to forgive herself? -Some of usindeed most of us in one way or anotherplay the dangerous game of ingesting drugs that modify our reality.

We are driven still to be someone, to be happy, to be good, but we find new ways of playing the game, and of understanding it.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott

The selfs adventure is a game of symbols, and yet it is deeply desperately real. Every morning billions of eyes open, and billions set forth. For many, the adventure only rarely rises above the level of a struggle to keep the body alive, but even the most miserable among us also hear the aspirations of the self the me craving reassurance that (a) it exists and (b) it is good.

But when we pursue happiness, we must pay a price for it. We must at all times defend the utter fragility of our delicately constituted fiction, deny its artificiality.

Because the happiness we pursue is a fabricated freedom.

How else could we begin to explain a home that suddenly was empty?

Chelsea Leigh Trescott

-That night, in the hours when he is normally asleep, my father began to write me. No dogs were jumping as I entered through the garage door. No kisses. No wet nose. This is how, that night, his letter begins. Not too long ago, we had eight dogs. One was stillborn. He complained about their shitting everywhere, their licking Bofos, the vet bills, etcetera. But they were always there to give him love whenever he wanted their love. He tells me he will give me something else to think about and to save. This is what my fathers first letter promises. In a blink of an eye, they were there and now there were none. One might say the same for your sister. A week ago, she sat in an office next to me. We had lunch together every day and today I eat alone. -By this time I will have, somehow, already known.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott

For instance, that the bright afternoon has faded for good on the lawn of my childhood.

And that to support a sister is to one day not be able to protect our father. -This is where things really break a part. POV needs to be changed in parts, also pronouns, the prose is really more moments that Id like to expand to a form more like the above: -The bright afternoon fades. Birds take wing from nests all around the sky. The sky is not blue. I was fourteen and in a field of short grass and it was a sheet of floating ice. The boys ran in a line on that field. When they jogged, they shouted. They held their arms out, and pushed on the others; and they never did see that gaze trickling through the iceyou had to have lain flat to notice. Where are we if we are not home? On sidewalks, the many small girls who are ushered back after school pause

Chelsea Leigh Trescott

to push open their bright umbrellas. A light rain has begun. The cat comes to the window and the childrens soft hands call forth a blossom to march under. I want to be a sound in the rain. I want to be magnified.

I burn a candle as tires press off the side streets. This is the instant to slip out of work and bring someone to bed, to notice where we belong. Wonder about the wound without thinking of the wound. How this delicate observation can trickle down a window in a solitary gaze, and cause in so many separate bodies an ache that cant be honoredis a reason to act out.

I want to relieve you as the nearest street fills with water.

The sky is gray and I am calm and craving a companionship that does not ache with time.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott

It is not blue. It is honest.

-You were young and rare and inconsistent, you are thinner than your family thinks you should be, were you happy with them, of course, you were proud youd like to give your father a hug but he has looked at you and he has said Youre killing yourself and you were already disappearing that summer he stayed on his wing of the house and organized his years as a Boy Scout into a shadow box mount he stepped out of his home office only when he went onto the sun deck and pissed in the yard you couldnt get used to seeing him that way and that was the point because he was mad at you because you were starving and did not see it that way he was afraid because our children surprise us when they are trying to forgive what we would not hear, or acknowledge hug me father

Chelsea Leigh Trescott

I am walking into your arms I am showing up for dinner so my mother can feed me. -We swim in a bay hotter than a bath and our mothers leave us in the low tide They scatter they collect What is the significance

Bent at the shoreline only she can know the weight she carries pails of shells and this is their method of hunting

Water pulls under the mothers bare feet, music

in the hot bay, a child learns to swim further out.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott

-I think of the young years as a way to bathe sit in the blue-tiled ditch jets crinkling my skin and shout to father who joins and would one-by-one take up his twins a game we liked to toss in his huge arms light like being cradled back to infancy -I am thinking of laughter after baptism a father who comes to see

Chelsea Leigh Trescott

how his two daughters though not identical shooting from water are the very same time intending to jump the pool next to him is cold and their young bodies shock by it.