All dressed up and no place to go.

I can only seem to muster up my tears when I get the privacy to dig out the most painful memories I own. I keep them in my closet and try them on when I can finally listen to my own music and dance alone in my dorm. They don’t fit quite as snug as they used to, loose and hard to keep close. But I dance around in them until my face is damp, then usually fold them up neatly and discreetly return them so no one will notice. Knowing that next time I try them on, they won’t fit quite right.

In the mirror, before I hid my memories back into my closet, I saw something different than I have before; a new little secret I was keeping from myself. The memories haven’t fit well for a while, but now they were torn and pieces are missing.

You are forgetting him.

I replay the quietest memory I have, hoping it is enough.

Charles Gibson finished telling me my bedtime story and I kissed my father on the forehead. The first time I can recall not doting on my dad before I went to bed. I went silently up the stairs until I heard my name. “Squitzoid,” he reminded, “I love you more than air.” His eyes glistened near the firelight, something about an 8-year-old in a nightgown made him emotional, “I love you too Daddy.”

Not enough to help me keep dancing. I dive back into my closet, frantically throwing aside useless items and tennis shoes. Trying on another memory, tightening my belt, turning up the volume, hoping it will get me by:

“Daddy I just don’t ever want you to go, I can’t have you leave,” my beat-red face cried. In desperation I curled up on his lap, aside his oozing pain, as I had so many times before, unable to accept the daunting future. With a few shrugs and pen tapping I noticed his handwriting, “ice cream” is what he wrote down. Unable to speak, walk, or think properly I was confused by his demand. “You can’t eat ice cream dad,” I remorsefully reminded him through my somber lips and ocean filled eyes. The pen tapping like morse-code, more urgent and important I was frustrated by his relentlessness when it became clear through a tap on shoulder. Ice cream for me. Ice cream to cure my tears. He had nothing more to offer when his body was failing him, but his heart continued to beat.

I keep layering the memories from my closet, accessorizing with old pictures and visions of a future he will never see. The necklace of advice I will never get when coming home from college, the shoes he won’t ever walk me down the aisle in, the hat of memories we will never be able to create.

All dressed up and no place to go.

So I take off the memories and prepare them for storage, for a night ahead when I am too weak to dance alone. I slip into my pajamas like the day my father died. When all I had was my nightgown and shrill cries of helplessness, curled into a woman-child on my aunt’s lap. Because I can’t walk around in memories like that, the colors clash and are not right for my skin tone. Sometimes those painful memories are all I want to wear.

But then I recall,

you had such a sense of style

and I will remember that when I look into my closet.