Nothing

I don’t know if you’ll care about this when you get older. Maybe you won’t, and if that’s the case, that’s fine by me. All I know is that every day, I watched you two grow a little, shedding the skin of your previous selves. Every day, I remind myself that, Eric, you need to write about them—or at least, start taking notes—so you don’t forget. And every day, I waved it off, why? Out of fear, perhaps. Fear of the stakes involved in writing about the world that means the most to you—the people who mean the most to you—and not hiding what parenthood and marriage really are. They’re beautiful, but hard. Boy, are they hard?

But I think the real reason is that I love you two so much that, I fear that I can’t write from above it. I’m not an 80-year-old man who’s looking back on his life through scrapbooks and half-memories, faint truths and illusions. I’m living right in it. As I write this very sentence, you’re both playing Lego on the floor next to me, screaming bloody murder and running back and forth from room to room. I tell myself that maybe I should wait until you’re older to write these stories, because there are still so many stories to come. But I think, I’ll try this now. I can’t tell you why, but it feels important.

You two need to be at the center of a story. As a writer, I can’t avoid it—nor do I want to. With fiction, I can hide behind the characters. I can scatter little pieces of my life through them, like pixie dust. But when you write nonfiction, it feels a little like standing up in front of a room filled with everyone you’ve ever known, taking off your shirt, zipping down the entirety of your midsection, and saying, “Hey, here’s everything that I am. And likely everything I’ll ever be.”

It’s a tough one, we’re so accustomed to hiding in plain sight. From the time we’re born, we’re trained—directly or indirectly—to stuff down that which causes us grief. We’re experts at it. Writing feels like self-exploitation. It feels like guilt, but a pang of necessary guilt.

Though I try my best to ensure that you both know the man behind the mask, I know there will still be times in life when something keeps you from coming to me. When embarrassment and shame creep into your consciousness, making you feel like you’re letting me down—or your mother. Times when you’ll be in your bedroom, feeling like the whole world is wrong. Wondering when you woke up to streets that felt different, skies that looked sinister, friends who were never truly friends—just small-town bodies in close proximity. It will happen, as it happened to me.

And though my parents never told me not to come to them, I still felt a natural inclination toward solitude. Reprieve through music and movies. Through anything except talking. Because even if you have someone to go to, sometimes, you just don’t have the words. That’s life. For better or worse.

At the end of the day, I’m writing these stories because I need to. As much as I need to breathe, to eat, to hydrate, to love—I need to write. And what’s more important than the two of you? As I hope you’ll gather from these stories, the answers will be spread out throughout the entire book.

Nothing