When I was a kid, there was this guy on TV called Mr. Rogers, and he used to sing: “You can never go down / can never go down / can never go down the drain.” What a fucking lie.

Once, I might have gathered my past in order to present it as a CV or a list of accomplishments, but now… now it seems like an inventory of trivialities, of things that could have been but are not. As a young man I felt the world and my place in it was all part of a plan. That success, whatever that is, was something to be gained simply by focusing on my work—on being good at “What I did.” As a workaholic father, I felt that the day-to-day grind was a way to provide, to see us through while life took its final shape. And now… now that the world around me has become an unbearable place, and all I have is the nausea of wrong turns taken and things lost. Now I know this is the real me. The permanent me. The solidified disappointment of that young man’s life—the subtraction of all those achievements of youth—the minus of a plus that was never tallied. This is me: weak, infirm, fading. Not giving up, because I never do… but living without faith in myself or my circumstance.

My heart flutters at the notion of never finding Zack—at the idea that he is gone forever. This I cannot accept. I will not accept.

Not thinking straight. But I will find him, I know I will. I have seen him in my dreams. His eyes looking at me, making of me that giant once again, calling me by the truest name a man can ever aspire to: “Dad.”

I have seen a light surrounding us. Purging us. Absolving me—of the booze and the pills and the blind spots of my heart. I have seen this light. I long for it again in a world this dark.

Beneath Columbia University