Perspectives, Dan
I’ve imagined what it feels like to be my dad.
I wonder if I stumbled upon more truth that I thought.
I wonder if it’s what being in New York City is like.
Time feels like a blur. I know I’m alive, but I certainly don’t always feel like I am. I feel like I’m stumbling about, zombie-like, living a dream, wading through some fog.
I see people wandering the streets, but I feel like I’m in some other reality where New York is a ghost town except I’m the ghost but still have to avoid running into all these bodies of the living lest I want to feel their righteous wrath.
I can be doing a number of things. Having a drink with friends. Having a picnic in the park. Having breakfast with my relatives. I have done all of those things.
“It’s already 2020,” someone says. It doesn’t matter who, because it could be anybody, or a bunch of people. Or it could have been me.
Where did the time go, everyone wants to know.
I have an additional question. How much time has actually passed?
I know this sounds dramatic, but humor me, because this is how it feels. My brain tells me I’ve been in New York for three months, but it doesn’t feel like three months. It feels like, one, or six, or twelve. If you’d told me it was twelve, I’d probably just go: “Damn, time flies.”
But I know it hasn’t been twelve months. And that’s the problem. Something feels wrong.
The three of us are laughing, trying to figure out what’s actually on the happy hour menu so we can argue over who’s getting the best cocktail deals.
Fried chicken. Beer. Upscale lounge. These are things that I like.
Having these things with good friends, these are things that I enjoy.
But something is wrong. I can feel it. My laughter is genuine. My smiles are real. But somehow, I can tell that I am not all here, like this isn’t quite reality.
This is the only answer I can give when they ask me: “How do you like New York so far?”
One of them challenges me on my hesitation.
“You just have to commit,” she says. “Go all in.”
She adds that I have a tendency to be overly cautious, to want to know the end before I take the first step. This fact is true, but I don’t think it applies here.
I’m not all here, not because I didn’t commit to it—hell, I basically moved everything I had. I had no intention, of going back to California.
And still, this doesn’t quite feel like reality. Something is wrong.
There’s a bunch of us, maybe fifteen. I don’t know all of them; in fact, I only really know my friend and his wife. It’s my friend’s birthday, and we’re having a picnic in Central Park during sunset.
This is how I imagined life in New York. Beautiful. Fun. Unique. Where else can you have a picnic, surrounded by families and friends of all stripes, with skyscrapers in the background—where else can you get this, except New York?
It’s a brief glimpse of feeling like I am all here, like I am alive.
My friend’s wife makes lemon curd cupcakes. They’re incredible.
“I love lemon curd,” this one guy says. I’ve just met him, but we hit it off, and I’m hoping this is the start of a new friendship in a city known for its difficulty in making friends.
He mentions Seattle and that his wife is from there. I tell him that I used to live there, and that there’s a lemon curd yogurt that I love. I give him the name, and warm him against looking at the nutrition facts, which is basically encouragement to immediately look them up.
“70 grams of sugar!?” he exclaims. “Let’s go!”
In that moment, life is good; life feels alright. It doesn’t last though.
Eventually that feeling returns. Something is wrong.
It’s not that this new friendship goes nowhere. It’s not that I have yet to have another picnic like this. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it.
I don’t know what it is.
There’s three of us: my (cousin) uncle, my aunt, and myself. We’re at a diner because that’s something we do—try different diners. They took me to one on one of my visits out to New York, and it’s become a sort of tradition ever since. I come visit, they take me to a diner.
We’ve tried fancy ones, cheap ones, Chinese ones.
We go to one of these more upscale ones. I’m a little worried because this one is my suggestion (in that I found it on a map and it was nearby), and I worry that people will be upset with me for having recommended one singular bad restaurant. I’m not entirely joking either.
“These poached eggs are beautiful,” my aunt exclaims when they bring an eggs benedict.
I breathe a sigh of relief.
Conversation with them is easy, and we talk about a number of things, usually including upcoming plans, how my work is going, how their retirement is going, my dad, and lately, memories of my mom.
There’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Every time I’ve come to visit—in the past—this is what we’ve done: go to diners, talk about life, talk about my parents.
And suddenly I realize, that’s the problem.
In the past.
Something is wrong. I consciously know what’s wrong. Unconsciously, there’s a disconnect.
The answer is simple—my mom is gone—but it belies something more complex.
It doesn’t feel like she’s gone, not while I’m here.
She might as well still be alive. Nothing is out of the ordinary. She doesn’t come up in conversations with my friends. She comes up when talking to my relatives, but they speak of who she was or how special she was—which is basically what they did when she was alive, just change a couple of tenses and what difference does it really make?
The truth is very few of these people I know here were a part of her life. And except for my visits, very few of them were a part of mine.
That’s part of the problem. This feels like a visit.
It feels like I just haven’t spoken to my mom in a long time. Like I just haven’t been calling her because I forgot, or because I’m busy, or because I did try but she didn’t pick up the phone.
It feels like it’s fine. It’s been a while, but I can try again. It doesn’t matter whether it’s one month, two, three, and I now realize that if I’m not careful, six, or twelve, or maybe twenty-four.
I can continue to go about my life. I can continue to build something here. But something will always feel wrong. I know it.
And I know that someday, I will wake up, and wonder where the time has gone.
There’s two of us: me, and my dad.
“You’re back from New York!” he smiles when he sees me, on my first visit back to California.
I don’t know if he actually remembers that I moved to New York, or if he’s just using the same logic that he knows, that if I’m not around, I must be in New York.
The same logic that tells me that if everything else feels ordinary, maybe my mom is still around.
The same logic that pushes him to ask me, “How is your mom?”
“She’s good,” I lie. Maybe it’s not a lie, if heaven is real and all.
“Is she home now?”
I pause. Like I always do. Like I always will.
“Yes.” Which, I decide is the truth.
He nods.
“Do you miss her?” I ask.
He nods.
“I’ll bring her next time I come.”
“Thank you,” he smiles.
He won’t remember this.
He doesn’t remember when I come the next day and he exclaims that I’m back from New York.
The days are simply the same. He’ll wait for me to come visit from New York. He’ll wait for his wife. Whether it’s a day, or less than a day, or multiple days in one.
I wonder if he knows that something is wrong, if he feels like maybe he’s in some dream state that’s foggy and zombie-like. And I wonder if he every so often still has glimpses of cognition where his mind aligns with mine.
I wonder if this is what Alzheimer’s is really like, where life can be full of things you like, enjoy, filled with friends, lovely moments—glimpses of feeling like you’re truly alive.
Take away that feeling that “something is wrong,” and maybe it’s not so bad. What do I know?
“Thanks for coming to visit,” he tells me each time I leave.
It’s almost 2020, but he doesn’t know the difference. But when I’m with him, I can feel the difference. Life suddenly makes sense again. Time makes sense to me. The pain makes sense to me.
And although it’s dramatic, the pain is how I know I’m actually alive.