I Wish

I wish there were a way to capture tactile memories, just as photographs can capture images. I wish there were a way to touch across oceans, just as voices through a telephone.

Taste, I can do without. And smell would be nice, but I can do without it, too. These two, I can give up for a while, while we wait.

But touch... sometimes, as before, I will touch myself--stroke my hair, caress my cheek, hold my hand--and imagine it is you, if only to hold on to memories, albeit false, of what makes me feel closest to you.

How to Get a Solid Nine Hours of Sleep

I slept a solid nine hours the past two nights. Before my world fell apart halfway through this year, nine hours was standard for me. Since then, I haven't slept nine hours straight. Until now.

The culprit (or, the answer to my sleep problems)? It seems the answer is something I never would have imagined: cookies.

A couple of months ago, my two younger sisters decided to get into the home baking business. Nothing big, really. They just got into baking one day and decided, hey, our stuff is yummy, maybe we should sell. And so they did. To their friends, to relatives, to the neighbors, to my boyfriend's officemates. The orders kept coming, and everyone was happy.

Until, as predicted by my Mom, my sisters began to lose interest in baking. J, whose interest in the baking part was marginal to begin with and who focused more on advertising (i.e., bringing goodies to school for her friends to taste), retail/marketing (i.e., getting orders), and accounting (i.e., reimbursing my mom for ingredients, gasoline, and electricity, and splitting up the profits between her and my other sister), showed up in the kitchen less and less. Q, who is the chief baker and is largely responsible for starting this whole baking thing, has lost all interest in the actual baking, decorating, and packing; all she likes to do now is make the dough/batter.

And so, to whom does all the work fall? No other than the mom and the older sister (i.e., me), and, by default, the older sister's boyfriend, of course.

And all this just in time for an order for a whopping 800 cookies, our biggest single order to date.

So, sometime in the afternoon on the day before the orders were due, we got to work. J was sick, so she was stuck in bed. Q wanted to bring mini cupcakes to her Christmas party the next day, so she got started on those. Mom laid out the baking sheets, preheated the oven, and brought out the cookie dough from the fridge (it was made the day before). I measured and balled the dough and placed the balls on a cookie sheet, and Mom placed them into the oven and was in charge of removing them from the oven when they were done. While they were baking, I continued to measure, ball, and place dough on the cookie sheets. Mom helped Q with the cupcakes.

Once the cookies were done, Mom removed them from the oven, and I eased them off the cookie sheet with a spatula (?) and placed them on a cooking rack, one by one. I then started to place more cookie dough on the sheet I just emptied. Meanwhile, Mom placed a new batch into the oven and continued to help Q with her cupcakes.

Before long, we were rolling like a machine. Mom removed a batch from the oven and placed in a new one before helping Q with her cupcakes. I took cooled cookies from the cooling rack and arranged them on a tray, got the fresh batch of cookies off the cookie sheet and onto the cooling rack, and spooned more cookie dough onto the cookie sheet, all the while keeping track of how many cookies we had already made.

Seven hours later, the machine was still rolling, although the cupcakes were done, Q was gone, and in between her oven duties, Mom went around fixing stuff in the house instead of frosting cupcakes. Seven hours later, the machine has not sat down once. Seven hours later, a new cog arrived in the form of R, my boyfriend.

We still needed to make four sheets' worth of cookies. Mom took over cookie duties, from spooning the dough onto the cookie sheet all the way to transferring freshly made cookies to the cooling rack. R and I began to pack the cookies into 40 containers, 20 cookies per. It was not a simply matter of putting 20 cookies into one container and moving on to the next. There tends to be some variation between batches, and we didn't want one container to have slightly darker or chewier cookies than another, so we arranged the containers into an assembly line and dropped a single cookie into each of them, one by one, to make sure each batch was represented in each container. The baking of the four remaining sheets of cookies and the packing took another hour and a half, after which all three of us, Mom and I, especially, were ready to collapse.

Eight hours of nonstop work without stopping to sit or eat (we did manage to drink water and use the bathroom when we needed to). Eight hours, the equivalent of a full day at work, and we made between 2/3 and 3/4 the minimum wage in your average Southeast Asian country.

Eight hours of baking cookies, it turns out, was all I needed to get my sleeping groove back.

Tomorrow I'll Show You How to Eat an Apple

I gave him an apple to eat while I had some cereal. He often doesn't have anything to eat until he gets to work, which isn't until about lunchtime, and I am trying to break him out of that bad habit. And if the way he ate that apple was any indication, it looks like it won't be a very hard habit to break.

Usually, when someone eats an apple, the entire core, top to bottom, is left behind, in a sort of double-concave shape. Not this guy. He ate pretty much everything but the area immediately surrounding the seeds and the seeds themselves. I laughed and fondly remarked that I had never seen anyone eat an apple so thoroughly. It amazed me, and I wanted to see it again.

Fast-forward to late night of the same day. We were in bed, about to sleep, and I was crying. He assumed it was because of my Dad, and it was--partly. But it was also partly because of him. The aftermath of my grief (or perhaps it is still ongoing grief) has somehow made me emotionally off, and I don't think I've been very good at showing him (or other people, for that matter) my love. This pains me because in less than a month, I will lose him too, in a way, as I will be leaving for Boston. I lost my Dad without being able to spend with him his last moments and say goodbye; I don't want to lose him in the same way: without being fully present and completely emotionally available to him during the time we have left.

If only it were so easy to fix my emotional state. Unfortunately, it is less like a broken car and more like a wound: you do not fix it; rather, you wait for it to heal.

A caress from a caring hand helps too. It may not directly heal the wound, but it does make one feel better.

Stroking my hair, he gently shushed me and and, "Don't cry." And then, to make me feel better, "Tomorrow, I'll show you how to eat an apple."

My Current State

I thought I knew what heartbreak was. But nothing breaks hearts like death does.

It's not just my heart that's broken. It's my entire world. When your Daddy dies, it's not just one circumstance of your life that changes. Your whole life does. Everything and everyone else around you stays the same, but somehow, the world is vastly different. Maybe because you are different, and so your relationship with a world otherwise unchanged is different. Or maybe the sameness of everything else adds to the strangeness: how can the rest of the world remain the same, how can life go on as it has, when a huge, gaping hole (in the shape of my Dad, or perhaps in the shape of my heart) has been torn into it?

This is, by far, my biggest heartbreak, and it is one that I haven't the faintest clue how to heal from.

I see people who lost their fathers months, years, decades ago, and they seem to be okay. I wonder, are they really okay, did they really manage to find a way to heal? Or are they, like me, simply on anesthetics to enable them to function in spite of the wounds?

How long can one anesthetize one's emotions before paralyzing them altogether?

How can I function without turning into a zombie?

You keep your emotions at bay, and you keep pushing them away and barring them from emerging to the forefront of your consciousness and saying, not now, not now. But you push them too far back, too many times, and they never return. And gone along with them are all the feelings, all the sensory memories, everything intangible you had of your Dad. He becomes someone in a photograph, a name, someone you know existed, your biological father. But he ceases to become your Dad, because you lose the emotional connections that made him your Dad.

And I don't want to lose my Dad again. You lose him once, your heart breaks. You lose him twice, you lose your humanity, or at least a big part of it.

I have too much to lose. And so, I must find a way to heal, properly, without numbness, without forgetting.