Poison ivy

Today's outfit: la tristesse. So few of my earliest memories include my father, but it's not because he was never around. I know he was, but somehow he's been filtered out of so many of the snapshots from a cherry blossomed childhood. When I think back I see us alone together, seldom or never in the company of others, and the tone of the images is harsher, more direct.

And sometimes in the silence and solitude he left behind I can't escape the itching from two little things, one that inevitably leads to the other. I think of the question without answer; what if they were the happiest times of our lives and what if nothing will ever compare to them, and what's even worse and what cuts inside me like an unsharpened butcher's knife whenever it comes to mind, I sometimes think that what if the happiest times of my life were not spent with him?