My dad grew up in the South with a preacher for a father, and the way he used to say it, he shot upwards soon as he hit adulthood. His goal? Make it over the Mason Dixon line.

He made it to Philadelphia.

That was far enough.

And it was, was the thing.

He’s alive, still. I want to clarify this before I keep writing about him. My dad is alive. He exists in this other dimension, touching base with our reality long enough to tell whoever is closest about his childhood dog, glassy-eyed and distant. He moves his hands and mumbles, sometimes. It is hard to get him to sit down, and then hard to get him to stand up again.

We talk about alzheimer’s in terms of ‘recognizing’ or ‘not recognizing.’ I wasn’t prepared for it to be less that and more distance.

Either way, he read as much as me and he wrote sometimes, normally in these cheap cardboard journals, brown and unmarked and thin. He burned them once they were full, every time. He told me it was because the point had been the process.

He said this when I was fourteen, too, and my computer crashed and I lost a 100k+ novel I’d been working on for years. I was inconsolable, and he said that, and I became angry instead.

He was so, so right, though?

It’s been a minute since I did that–wrote, and then destroyed.