After a few months apart, my dad and I met up today. Finally. We walked for a few hours on a windy Connecticut afternoon, over the terrain of our mutual past, getting ourselves on the same page, and turning a few in the process. Our relationship is one of extreme closeness and too long away from dad’s conversation and company leaves me feeling stuck and unsure of my purpose, a sentiment that has felt somewhat exaggerated of late. Codependent? Maybe, luckily, we talked about that too.

The older I get the closer to my past I become. I am aware now of emotions that I have never before been present enough to feel, a testament to a tumultuous year full of change and courageous confrontations.

But it’s also painful. I watched my dad pull away today in his company car and felt cold with the knowledge that I have no idea when next we’ll meet. Almost instantaneously my mom arrived home from a daylong artist’s workshop and I turned my eyeballs skywards, thanking the great whomever above me that my parent’s paths had not crossed. My reaction to her return felt out of my control, as if I was watching myself become angry and withdrawn in response to her presence, a default response of pure emotion with little else to back it up. For years such was normal protocol in all areas of our relationship, and is thankfully no longer so, but transition between my parents still incites irritation and impatience.

Attempting to dispel the frustration I felt with my own anxious anger, I went out for a long drive, flying down 95, listening to Hartford’s number one for hip hop and R&B and watching the sun set like a blood orange in the sky, spilling it’s juicy soul all over the blue shoreline horizon. I shifted into the soft blue of the evening, and drove long into darkness. When the radio went fuzzy, I put Mariah Carey on my Ipod and shamelessly sang along, slipping over back roads, and past the landmarks of my childhood I once thought gone forever.

Funny how one can learn
To grow numb to the madness
And block it away
I left the worst unsaid
Let it all dissipate
And I try to forget

As I closed my eyes
Steadied my feet on the ground
Raised my head to the sky
And the time rolled by
Still I feel like a child
As I look at the moon
Maybe I grew up a little too soon

As I sang, as I related to the music of a much teased lady songstress, I eased myself into acceptance, and thought a lot. Not the conscious sort of consideration, but the kind couched in music and in the speed of the car through the moonlit darkness of a starless night.