Two of my classmates, discussing a most beloved subject of mine:

"...But he's really starting to get under my skin. The last few poems we read blew me away. I'm starting to like, think about him a lot--what he'd think of things...like other poems. I think about what he'd say about things."
"Me too."

---

For a while now, I've been having trouble sleeping. I went through a bout of fairly severe insomnia when I was a teenager--went to see specialists, the whole lot. This lasted well into my early 20s. I have a tendency toward waking nightmares of anxiety--I don't know what brings them on. But even the smallest, remotest troubles seem to grow into great, impossible, untraversable crags of fear, paranoia, regret and hopelessness in the middle of the night. I don't know what it is. Perhaps the darkness and obscurity turns the eye inward, where the shadows and passing, throbbing glares are more pronounced than the softly wandering phantoms of headlights roving across the walls and ceiling.

Listening to overnight talk radio has eased me through these wakeful nights. Usually the soft murmuring of voices in my ear, blinding out the silence, puts me to sleep in minutes. This may be an echo of childhood, when I would lie awake in my small bed and listen to my parents voices in the kitchen. They always stayed up late talking, drinking, smoking cigarettes. My father's voice deep and warm, the twinge of strain that came with an excited postulation, my mother's voice quiet, even, melodic--her laughter so unique, those little staccato gasps of happiness. When I was a baby, my father used to lie in bed with me on his chest, listening to overnight talk radio. Sometimes he'd plug a single ear bud in my slumbering ear, so I could listen with him, before language was even a part of my consciousness. As a child I'd lie beside him in the dark on cold, clear winter nights, with the old shortwave radio and we'd try to tune in Russia, like low-tech spies with our hushed ears pressed to a sealed door. The strange, futuristic whistling noises between signals delighted me--he'd poke me in the ribs and say with playful solemnity, "Listen, Yaeddle...It's the aliens." Yaeddle. A small nonsensical word--like so many in the silly private language we share--my daddy's word for me. It is how I still sign my name to his birthday cards; it's the first thing he says every time he sees me again, stooping to hug me with his round, cheerful laugh.

How can I not romanticise this childhood?

But my preoccupation these days is not with my father, but with my father's father. With the black mark left by his blood in my veins with each pulse. He was a man blighted by genius and disappointment and alcohol. I lie awake in the darkness and consider him--his predatory shadow stalking through my cavernous self, slamming doors behind it. How can he haunt me so when he never even lived to see my birth--a birth that his death nearly prevented because of what it did to his son. Each of my failures is a triumph of his disease--this infection that outlived his broken, bloated body and the oblivion of the soil. And yet I love him. I love him because he is a man I never knew, yet feel stirring within me, not only in his flashes of malevolence, but in his despairing vulnerability. I love him because his smile, his square jaw is my father's smile, my father's square jaw, and the mischievous, slightly awry mouth is my own. He gave me these healthy, but intemperate and sometimes melancholic peasant genes. He gave me ancestors who were sturdy black-eyed men and round fertile women who lived hand-to-mouth on richly forested hillsides. He gave me my name. My name that nobody pronounces correctly the first time--five simple letters that can be either beautiful or ugly or both when they roll off the tongue. And just like that name, just like my grandfather, I can be savagely cruel or poignantly tender. Just like him I ache for love, yet cannot bear its implications. Just like him--just like my father even--I live, literally exist for words, for expression, for understanding, for contact with something other, something that only language can illuminate, and yet for which language is so wholly inadequate. But if I see him, if I stare him down in the blackness of the night, if I look into his dark, ink-smudge eyes without fear, will I be able to transcend the sickness that binds me to him? Because that is what his pressing, suffocating ghost is urgently longing for--that I will learn to love everything in this life that he could only hate, and so redeem us both.