When I was thirteen I realized that I wanted to be a poet.

Since I was a child I've archived my life, keeping journals, letters, calendars, notes scribbled on napkins, all placed into the appropriate boxes or trunks, carefully labeled and preserved. My photo albums are lined up chronologically, each one displaying a slip of paper taped to the outside with the dates written in my careful grey-blue script. Seven boxes for letters: Letters from Liz, Letters from Mom, Letters from Laura, Lucy, Holly & Channah, Misc Letters...

Perhaps these actions determined my own fate, perhaps I brought this upon myself, but since I was young I knew that one day I would need all of these materials, that I would need to remember it all, so that I could tell my story. My biggest fear in life is forgetting. I write everything down. I file it away. I write down the place in which I filed it away. My home, my heart, built upon bricks of words. I collect them and organize them. I line my walls with them, shelter my desk, my body with little black type-written words. If I had no paper I would write on the walls, on my skin.

Four and a half years ago I took a trip to the Czech Republic with my father to visit war memorials and to see the town over which he was shot down, the town into which he parachuted. It was there, for the first time, that I realized how important his story is and how important it will be for me to one day tell it. In a little shop in Oloumoc I bought a tape recorder. For the next three years I recorded him constantly. Mostly he would lean back into the couch, a martini in one hand, talking for long stretches, the little wheels whirring inside a machine that would preserve his voice. But I also recorded him in regular conversation, at restaurants, sometimes even on the telephone.

I realized during that trip to the Czech Republic, not just that I would need to tell his story one day, but that I would need to tell it because he would no longer be able to tell it himself, that one day soon I would no longer have a father. I recorded him for myself, so that I may always hear his voice, never be a girl looking to the sky and wondering if that something distant could be love.

For the first few years after my mother died I would often sit up late, on the edge of my father's bed, crying. It would build up during the months that I spent living my life in Manhattan, it would build up as the semesters went by, as I poured drinks for strangers, a fat wad of cash building in my pocket. It would build up as I told myself over and over that I could do this, that I was strong enough to do so and that I always would be. It would build up until I arrived one evening in Los Angeles, my father meeting me at the airport, long plastic tubes of oxygen leading from the backseat into his nostrils.

It would build up as we sat through dinner that night, as we turned off the lights and said goonight, each of us with one lamp left on to read by. It would build up until I was a few pages into whatever book I was reading at the time and I would roll over onto my back, the ceiling hovering too close to breathe under. I would climb out of bed and slip through the door into his room, sit on the edge of his bed and cry. He would sit up a bit and let me cry, tell me that it would be okay, that even after he was gone that it would be okay, that he was certain of the kind of woman I would turn out to be.

One night, as I pushed back the covers to leave my bedside for his, I grabbed the tape recorder. I have never listened to the tape I made that night. On it I am sobbing and my father is comforting me.
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