by Courtenay Nearburg

Eugene Everett Nearburg
9/14/24 - 8/17/97

I'm filling a book a year -- I'm coming to the end of this one and I am more myself than ever before, alone in my thoughts, with my memory who speaks silently in all voices to my loneliness. It's unfortunate, this condition, needing to remember so much, but so afraid of the vision. If I found an answer to my searching, I think I would finally be eternally lost. If he hears me dreaming, he knows how his eyes shiver me inside.

I think this must be God, my father's voice in his eyes, burning there with an unmistakable ache. He dances smoothly in suede shoes. His watery countenance washes over me and I glisten incandescently in the nighttime, a Jupiter moon above setting a glittery rhythm.

My father effortlessly graced my reality. His stoic ways entranced me, his unwavering intelligent gaze demanded my rebellion. He sat to the right of the moon, his judgment dripping from his fingers. My father drives, gliding on a highway of light into the eternal, a pearl fedora perched atop his pate, a solar wind pulling trails of stars from his brim. The Cobra lustres metallic under his gentle caress, and his manicured hand flashes across the dash, settling briefly to shift into fifth gear, then quickly withdrawing to flick a silver comb from his breast pocket. He tips his hat back to smooth the silky mouse's belly hair slick against his neck. With the slightest motion, the comb slips back into place, and my father sucks an El Rey do Mundo across thin lips. I remember the ember breaking into orange swirls across the blacktop. Only, the black asphalt has merged with the flat plain to become starry sky and it is raining. He's a dream and I feel like I died last night.

He is alive, unfettered by worry and fatigue, free to expand into me, seeing me whole and raw simultaneously. It's the truth I never told him. Now I belong to him completely, as I never could before. He was my reason to achieve, my person - whom - I - always - wanted - to - be. Give me a piece of the dream and I'll weave it into the story. He is within me.