how i've been doing

People ask me how I've been doing, and I tell them I've been doing fine. That's sort of what's expected, right? Nobody actually wants you to lay it down on them, and tell them how you're really feeling. I wonder if there's something wrong with me because I've cried a lot less than I expected. A lot less than I think what other people were expecting. 

Sometimes I think maybe it's because there's hardly anything left in me to cry out. It's been a yearlong story of grief, climaxed by the passing, and the falling action has been figuring out how we move forward now. Because how could we move forward before? It was like a darker, less comical version of Groundhog Day, since every day was more or less the same. 

I've become accustomed to thinking of my life as a story, a movie, or maybe a soap opera. I hope at least the writers are having fun because I am not. I think if I were the writer, I'd spend most of the time as I do right now when I am finally able to pick up the pen and write: wondering what the fuck is wrong with me. 

I spend an ungodly amount of time on my phone, always filling the silence with some show I've already seen a thousand times over. I white-knuckle book pages and gaming controllers, trying in vain to trade one reality for the next. Writing used to be a form of escapism for me, but I haven't been able to dream up a different world of my own lately. 

It might be a good thing; if my words come out of me on paper instead of rolling off my tongue, at least I know then they don't hurt anybody. Every time I bite my tongue, I feel wise, even when the inside of my mouth starts to taste like metal. 

I think maybe it's been easier because I stepped out of all of it. Or maybe, it was life that pulled me out of it. 

My dad died on the fourteenth. I got married on the sixteenth. 

I don't feel the absence as heavily as the others do; my mother and younger siblings still live in the house where my dad died. I'm living on my own for the first time, with the person I've adored for the past five years. I'm learning how he fits into my mornings, afternoons, and evenings. I'm learning the walls and corners of our apartment, how to walk through it at night. I'm becoming familiar with the smell of the old paint and vinyl floors. I'm befriending the cat that visits our door every other evening. 

But I go to my little sister's basketball games, and I'm always there early. I'm always there early because my dad and I always liked to watch the other team warm up, to gauge who were the starters, who were the ball handlers, and who were the shooters. And I sit in the bleachers by myself because my husband has physics homework, and my mom can never show up to anything on time. And that's when I can feel it, that emptiness on my left side, where my dad should be, but he's not. He's not there. He's not there and he will never be again because he's dead. 

But I'm not going to cry at a basketball game. 

My dad and I used to go watch the state basketball tournament every year. We'd sit in the corner of the stadium with his friend, Gene, and we'd drink the free chocolate milk and eat deep-fried donuts. And last year was the exception because he was sick but this year it's because he's not here anymore. 

I don't take any more bags of coffee from work, grind them up for a moka pot, and take them to my parents' house because my mom doesn't drink coffee and my dad already drank his last coffee and it wasn't one I made for him. I make drinks for people with my dad's name. I get off work and I smell like my dad's mornings. 

And I go and I sit in my '87 Mercedes, the one with the wood trim my dad refinished and the sherpa seat covers my dad took from the junkyard. I go and I sit and I pull on the seatbelt that my dad never and will never finish putting back together. My friends say I should get it fixed. My older brother says I should get it fixed. My husband says I should get it fixed. But I don't want to get it fixed. I don't want it to be fixed unless it's my dad who fixes it for me. And he can't. 

If I was an honest person, if I was more like my dad, I would just say that when people ask me how I'm doing. I'm so, so happy that I am married to my best friend. But I'm so, so sad and so, so angry that my dad wasn't there for it. 

And when we get married again in May, my older brother said he'd walk me down the aisle, and he will. I love my older brother so much, but he's not my dad.