i

have been drawing more and more and i don’t know if it’s me procrastinating so i don’t have to worry about writing or if it’s me becoming obsessed with my dad’s point of view. i wrote some variation of this on my substack. i have been using oil pastels and recreating images like my dad used to and i have loose paper floating about our house with drawings and i think of my mother when my dad first started painting and she was like “well what am I going to do with all these?” and how she filled all of her walls with everything he ever painted. and that wall still exists and i swear it is some semblance of a living, breathing version of my father. it’s as if he embedded himself into every single painting and i am so thankful they exist. his death anniversary came and went just like everything else has in this past year. and as we all know, grief is terrible and i just miss him and this place can feel weird a lot of the time without him here and as those feelings start to stack on each other, i remind myself to rest and and if i need a big cry, i have a big cry. i remind myself to take it moment by moment and focus on the things that make me feel okay to walk through this place without my dad. things like wake up, get out of bed, take my vitamins, drink my water, do an exercise, shower, get ready, make something. it sometimes feels like a wash, rinse, repeat sort of thing but it helps in some way.  the drawing always makes me feel like he’s there. i go through conversations with him and at first i thought it was silly like of course he can’t answer me but i ask questions and as i draw i come up with answers and yes they’re my answers but i wonder if they are actually his. anyways, the drawing, the making something along with exercise have been my two big things lately.  they make all this fairly manageable at the moment so for this moment that’s how i’m coping. and therapy of course which i have graduated to monthly. the idea is that hopefully i’ll become someone better and it’s not to say i’m not good enough, it’s just to say i hope i continue to be better. things like grief can put us in say like a fork in the road and it can get dark and it often gets dark but the idea for me is not to stay on that dark path. i want to choose the path that is light and colorful and full of flowers and people and love and music and yes i have to take a lot of pauses now. i think before i lived on that light path, danced through there, sometimes ran right through it and now i am just steadily focusing on one foot in front of the other. and i know that’s what my dad wants for me and in a way i think it’s where he is too, which is maybe why i want it even more. so here’s to putting one foot in front of the other, at whatever pace we want.

l, js