Dad,

Ten years have passed since you last wrote me anything, but still I can vividly remember the way your handwriting looked on the page. Letters scrawled with conscious effort in all capitals. Your penmanship never reflective of the inner chaos so often present within your heart and mind, the slowly etched lines and curve hardly ever revealing the struggle you faced just to hold your hands consistently steady. How neat I remember it always looking. I tried to mimic your affinity for utilizing only capital letters, and soon thereafter laughing at myself and how sloppy it always seemed to appear in comparison to yours. But every now and then when I’m not paying attention my wrist moves the way yours did so many years ago and I form letters and words that make it look as if you yourself had been taking notes with my pen, with my hand. And every time that happens I catch myself holding my breath and feeling you looking at me through ink and lines scribbled hastily on notebook paper. Just tonight I wrote “Dad,” just the way you used to, in the upper left hand corner of all the envelopes encasing all of the cards you sent baby carrot sister and I over the years: Two carefully etched capital “D’s” and one artistically woven lowercase “a.” I still have the last such envelope we received. It’s orange, and has since its original sending been filled with pictures of you, and with pictures of baby carrot sister and I that you kept on the desk in your apartment.

Ten years have fallen like sand through my fingertips and I can still smell you when I close my eyes and drift back to your arms wrapped around me and my head nuzzled into the armpit of your t-shirt that boasted a scent I had memorized, but not labeled. It would be years later until I would recognize the distinct scent of you as the easily identifiable smell of Old Spice deodorant, a scent that upon filling my nostrils to this day stops me where I stand and sends me backward in time, to a movie night at grandma’s house and me curled up on a pillow in your lap, you running your fingers through my brunette hair that turns wavy like yours if it isn’t straightened by some unnatural process, as I drifted off to sleep.

Ten years have etched themselves into the very feel of my skin, have manifested their changes in a physical relocation and the upcoming culmination of an undergraduate career long in the making, in the rekindling of the dearest of friendships, in the reception of new comrades-in-pens, in the severing of connective tissue once linking me to a time in my life when I decided to be self-destructive and selfish.

A decade of growth. Ten winters, and ten springs. Ten summers and ten autumns, and I can still remember how safe I felt with you, how I couldn’t wait for weekends to begin, because weekends meant trips to Greenbluff during the fall to taste cider and get lost in hay mazes and pick lopsided pumpkins to carve. Weekends meant trips to the fair where you would incessantly tease me about riding The Zipper and where I looked at you like you were crazy, and then pretended to be fearless and board rides that secretly terrified me, where baby carrot sister and I could pester you until you relented about playing the arcade style booth games you always told us were impossible to win by design, but that we still always wanted to play because we thought we were different, that we would win. Weekends meant trips to Colbert–to grandma’s–to traipse around our “little woods” and pick buttercups and other wildflowers growing amidst the pine shadowed forest floor for mom, and model airplane building, and movies, and homemade huckleberry pancakes for breakfast. Weekends meant suffering the hour and a half drive that felt like days up to a lake that baby carrot sister and I would come to adore, and need, and consider our very own. But most of all, weekends meant you. Weekends meant the three of us and adventure ripe for the creating.

But weekends never meant perfection, and they, by definition, never meant always. And you never meant perfection, and you couldn’t mean always. Our memories are most surely not flawless, and I’m so glad. I’m glad because ten years later and you are still so real to me. And I am by default more real for having known and for having lost you; Knowing you taught me to feel, and to love whole-heartedly or not at all, and that fathers are blessed and human and flawed. Losing you taught me to see, and how to truly calculate value in this life, and for what to be thankful. Losing you revealed the depths of a family’s love, and taught everyone that knew you how worthy it remains to love whole-heartedly, no matter the potential or inevitable loss involved.

Ten years have elapsed since you left me standing on a riverbank searching the surface of an ice-ridden river in April for some sign of remorse. Since you left me searching her curves and waves for your voice, for the warmth of your skin, for a promise that you were going to emerge and swim back to me.

Ten years later and I can still feel my chest throb painfully as if all of the air in my lungs had been sucked out in an instant: The way it felt the moment mom opened her mouth to tell us you were gone. In a second all recognition of further sound ceased, as if there really was a remote to control the universe and a finger from the heavens had pushed “mute.” I remember being on the floor and looking up at her, unable to breathe or utter a syllable, and thinking you diving into that river in April was a joke. Because you knew better. You, the man that taught me everything I know about water and water safety. The man who taught me to be brave, and to enjoy time spent pool and lake-side, but to still harbor a close-knit, respectful fear of water — a knowledge of its inherent power — so as to prevent foolish behavior. There isn’t anywhere in the world I feel more comfortable than in the water and under it, beating wave and current with my body, paddling, diving, and propelling myself back to the surface, breathing. Always breathing. And I find myself still wanting to dive into that thieving river every year on this day, at the precise location into which you dove ten years ago. I want to save you, and to save me. And to make it across because you didn’t, because you couldn’t.

Ten years and the sensation of wanting to die to be with you still fresh in my memory, the idea that you leaving this earth with me still on it not existing as a feasible reality, still rooted in my brain like the reeds coveting the river’s shoreline. I remember wanting answers, wanting vengeance, but mostly, just wanting you back with me. I remember too desiring to lay underneath the waves and hold my breath as their frigidity passed over me, and feel what you felt as you traveled home via an underwater route.

And the morning I considered running to the river, instead, and through swollen tear-streaked eyes, I looked at the myriad pictures of you scattered across my basement bedroom floor, and then I stood up and looked in the mirror. And in my reflection I saw eyes you helped create, and remnants of your smile in mine, and your nose, and your hands, and your ears. I saw you in me.

And it was in that moment, after thirteen years of life, that I realized that I could never leave this world until called.

And so instead of drowning I cried and kicked and screamed, and missed you, and loved you from here. And in the process I found faith buried at the bottom of a river, lapping steadfastly, undeterred and warm amidst the chill of a volatile, unpredictable current.