daughter diaries #3 (she'd be the best you ever had if you let her)
written by Grace Anne McKean
a diary entry from editor-in-chief Grace on all her reflections and inquisitions, posted on the last Sunday of each month.
He never let me choose the music.
In the car, he had complete control of the soundtrack: Various jam bands and eighties classics, the kind of songs he would hear through his bedroom floorboards on the nights his parents would stay up too late. He was very persistent about the fact that his father would’ve been a famous rockstar if his heart didn’t fail him at 45. He persisted on a lot of things, actually. On the rare occasion that our tastes would intersect, like when Roxanne came on while driving to his mom’s house, he’d skip the rest of the song when he realized I knew the words. I feigned anger. He knew when my fire was counterfeit. I think he just didn’t know how to surrender to performance. And I— I am always performing.
It’s pathological at this point. So much so that I don’t know where the performance ends and I begin. This must mean that my impression of myself is somehow just as bonafidely me as whatever version exists when I’m alone in my bedroom. I like to study actors. I like to watch them kiss and scream and die so that I, too, will know how to act when the time comes. But he could always tell between the imitation and the real thing. He told me that most emotions are useless anyway; better to be performed than felt. He didn’t feel robbed of any version of myself that I wouldn’t show him. He liked to play along. A working-class American boy raised by two youngest children who never learned what it meant to take care of anyone besides themselves. He took care of me by pulling me closer into his chest. I’ve never had much of an affinity for compassion; I wouldn’t know what it looked like if you served it on a plate before me. But I imagine it resembles the sound of his heartbeat against my cheek.
I would do anything for him. He still wouldn’t let me choose the music.
What would I even play anyway? No song parallels his soft snore that woke me in the middle of the night, no melody that approximates his brink of an orgasm. I attempt to utilize the hopeless search bar: Songs that sound like I’m doing exactly what I should be doing and that I don’t have to stop, not until he tells me to. Results are inconclusive.
When he was twelve years old, he broke all ten of his fingers holding onto the hatch of the passenger seat of his mom’s sedan. When his mom slammed the door shut, it was supposedly an accident, but it happened seconds after the first time he said the words “I hate you” to somebody he loved. I told him, “Timing is everything,” as I felt the soft indentation of his index and middle finger, the way they create a parenthesis around the negative space, like a portal to something not entirely within my viewpoint. Too small to fit through, too ineffable to keep tucked away forever.
But I like to imagine if I could step through him, it would feel like an epiphany. Or like an old memory I’d forgotten for years, and am finally remembering again. Marcel Proust wrote something about the Madeleine; how one bite unleashed a tide of memories of his entire childhood and ultimately of his entire life. This is how it felt to hold him, taste him, love him. I wish I knew him as a child. I wish I knew him as an old man, all tender and impenetrable at once. I never got the chance to tell him this.
As for the epiphany: Kissing him was as close as I’ll ever get. When I kissed him for the last time, I remember wishing I didn’t know it was the last time. I want the privilege of not knowing what I had when I had it. But I was cursed to savor. I’m an emotional doomsday prepper, and he was the bunker in my backyard.
He persisted on a lot of things, like choosing the music or the way love likes to grow in places it’s not supposed to. I asked him once in the car if performing love was just as honorable as feeling it. He turned up the radio and banged his palm against the steering wheel to the rhythm. I still don’t know the answer, but in that moment, it mattered less and less as each song began, finished, and began again.
This would be a great novel. You just need a lot of the beginning and a little more to the end.