Something That Happened Tonight

I don't know what happened.

My Mother has been going through a trunk full of family records. Pictures and letters mostly. I read a note written down on fragile yellow paper from my father to my mother while undergoing his treatments. His handwriting was terrible.

"I hope you can read this because I am very nervous."

He asked how I was. He said I was growing like a weed. It's hard to imagine my father saying that. I don't remember his mannerisms. Or his voice.

I put the note back where I found it and decided to investigate pictures. Pictures of Eric, pictures of Aaron, Christopher, Ashley. Some of them brought me back just as memories do. I came across a picture of my father holding Eric. It moved me. I moved on to a picture of our first dog Penny, a Black Labrador. Like my father, she seems like a memory from an entirely different life. Sometimes it doesn't even seem like my life. Like a movie I saw one afternoon in my old room, at my old house. A dead father, a dead black dog.

These things moved me so much. I had to write something down. A poem. In my head the words kept repeating: a dead father, a dead black dog.

I sat down and opened up my laptop but the words stopped there. How can that happen? How can something move me that much I can't put it into words? Maybe words can be said but they could never resemble any decent articulation. A dead father, a dead black dog. A dead father, a dead black dog.