What can I say?

Isn't that the question that holds you off after a long silence? When I haven't spoken with a friend for a long time, allowing that time to stretch longer gets incrementally easier. And blogging is kinda the same.

Actually, family is the same, too. At least for me, and this I know because I finally saw my father for the first time in over five years, well before I got married. We hadn't talked or written in all that time. It's complicated, of course.

But I had settled into a submission to his absence from my life, because I just didn't know what to say. Didn't know how to bridge the ever-growing gap. It took a call from my step-mother telling me he'd been living in a West Virginia VA for a couple of months and had been diagnosed with dementia, to go along with the seisure disorder, the years of medicine for which added a blood disorder, to break the inertia.

It was a good trip. In the middle of an absolutely crazy time, new job, start of school, I took a red eye to Baltimore and drove to Martinsburg WV and spent a couple of days connecting with my dad, for the first time unmediated by mother or step-mother.

No such seismic event helped me break the inertia here. I'm still not sure what to say. I'm living very much in the moment these days, in the space directly under my nose. This is the most writing I've done outside of work in over a month, easily.

So, maybe I'm just calling to say hello, but strategically at a time when I expect to get your voicemail because I have no real news.

Because I don't want the bridge to get too big.