“Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”  

I was having birthday parities, camping with my little cousins, saying goodbye to my mother, watching her pack her bags.

“Will you be gone for a long time?” I asked her. I was sitting on her bed, watching her iron each of her dresses.

“I don’t know why I bother ironing. The second I pack up them, they’ll be wrinkled all over again.”

“Then why don’t you stop ironing?”

“My mother always ironed everything she wore, and she tore me apart if my clothes weren’t pressed. I hated it, but now I’m the same as her. You will too someday, even if you don’t want to.”

“What? Iron everything? I’ll never do that.”

“No, you’ll be just like me.”

“I don’t want to be like you,” I told her, and she smiled at me.

“That’s just how it works.”

Then I was riding a bike for the first time, reading the funnies, falling from a tree, learning to walk, to talk, and being born in the corner room. It was raining outside. My Nonie was there, holding my mother’s hand. Crying she was so happy. My father chose my name. He spelled it out for the doctor. The nurse brought my mother strawberry ice cream and a bunch of balloons. I wanted to see all of it. I kept going until it wasn’t my life anymore.

I saw my mother pregnant. I watched my parents shop for groceries, vacation inFlorida. I saw their wedding, my father proposing to my mother, their high school graduation, watched them ride around town in a red convertible, their first kiss, the first time they met, the flowered dress my mother wore. I left my mother. I went with my father further back. I watched him learn to drive, ask a girl to the movies, drink his first beer, look over the edge of the Grand Canyon, earn a cub scout badge, argue with his parents, skip rocks at the river, and then junior high. He walked to school, holding a packed lunch that grandma made him. He stopped at the corner and talked to the old crossing guard. He never said a word in class. He sat at the back of the room and drew pictures of spaceships and astronauts. I watched my father watch that girl, the one he talked about. I saw her face, her bright eyes, her smile. I stayed there for a long time, watching.

I stayed there and watched my father walk behind her in the hallway. I watched him stare from across the lecture hall, his head rested on his palm.

Jake.

“Talk to her,” I told my father, and he looked up. My father walked over to the girl.

And I knew what that meant for me.