There are diffuse moments, the sensorial and event-based ones, the ones that occurred in real time. I can iron them out, fold them, and inspect their construction closely. I map them in time, our figures occupying the company of one another under ceilings with crown molding and kitchens with sinks and cabinets. They are immediate and tender, even the ones where I find him evil (rare, but they exist). Light, smell, feeling, and the polishings of memory—the way I picture his face in my mind, and how dust hangs in sunlight strewn air whenever I do. These are the place settings of personal record, to sit down and delight in. They bestow unto me the figurative life of my father. He's not a singular anecdote but an accumulation of them—his very particular ways of living in the world that sum what I can extract of his perspective now. He was a strange and observant, sometimes severe, curious and obsessive man.

It’s my wish to condense who he was and who he became in his absence. It's something impossible—to grow into something that doesn't exist. That's what I'm trying to isolate, how his bones have taken on a different shape upon his physical exit; they have collapsed into a strange domicile to inhabit. I'm trying to maintain the shape of the world in the way he lived in it so that I too can see The Truth he obtained under his skin. The way he saw the world and the way he taught me to see it disintegrates every day, into something new... something new becomes nothing.

A friend and I discussed things left up to God and the tragedy of the limitations in their descriptions. Writing these phrases felt awesome during their construction but terrible in every following moment because the ecstasy of language doesn't last to explain something that never ends. What relief would I experience from being understood? That's the trouble in finding methods to describe my experience here because its location, its syntax, its rules feel revised. The terms become outdated when I type the word—it's the expiration date of a perspective rectified by every thought that follows, which are not exempt from the same fate. I can't find where I am sad anymore because it's not attached to a ceiling with crown molding or a kitchen with cabinets; it's connected to something of fantasy, something derived from the pictures I had of something that life isn't. A location for my loss is the life I live in, one that's so charmingly full of love and charged with the desperation of wanting to know what I cannot.

My only hope over the past few years was to find you as I did while you were dying—mild and honest, softhearted and human. A daughter's dream is to be protected. What was most painful to reconcile was that, because of your mortality, I am exposed to the world, one I didn't fathom seeing without your guidance. One I had hoped to distill further before you left. I didn't realize during your lifetime that a father is nothing but a man made of skin. In the time since you departed from Earth, The Truth isn't clear because I cannot see the world as you did while I move further away from the event of your death. There is a lookout there, abandoned, where we once stood together—now overgrown.

The memory of your skin resides in the locker of your absence (labeled OCT 12, 2019). The material records I keep of you are dispersed between a variety of different organizational supplies and tools commonly found in offices: a filing cabinet, a USB thumb drive, a fireproof safe, a manila envelope. These are the physical containers of you, plastics that retain the shape of your words in pocket recorders, papers in notebooks that say 'DAVID J. MARINELLI, CALCULUS III, PROF DAHLKE.' There is no skin; there are only objects.

There is a physicality I dream of in the afterlife. I take my most crafted, inset, true visualizations of heaven and concoct an image. The most vivid picture I can test unwinds symbolically mostly because the identifiers I have created to understand life after death only exist in earthbound images: a cloud, a parallel universe where Emily is brunette and I'm a blonde, or perhaps a reunion with you. I don't know that you'd recognize yourself on this side of life—the only one I currently have. That is the tear in death, the failure for you to exist as the image of Dad for both of us, and my failure to understand what you are now. You were the olive-complexioned, balding, and blue-eyed man of my childhood. I don't know anymore, and I can't, because you are not here (if 'you' is even the right word to use at this time).

An image is what you believe anything to be, which it is inherently not because it is only an image. A man is anything you believe him to be.