Lake Superior

My dad is parking the car in our driveway and he tells me, "I've met this girl and she's a huge Tragically Hip fan". Without missing a beat, I tell him, "that doesn't make her special, you know". And he knows that I am right and he deflates the conversation with his silence. But I remember how my dad is always the one who says "I love you" first, how he told his second ex-wife on their second date that he was going to marry her. She thought he was crazy but she didn't know that he was just forming a constellation that she would one day long to camp under. My dad is always the one who says "I love you" first. I heard it when he kissed my mother's pregnant belly and I remembered it when I was born like a song heard in the womb. My dad is throwing a baseball at me and in the satisfying sound of the baseball falling in the center of my glove I hear it again. I throw the baseball back and it narrowly misses his head, thwacking against the wooden fence in the driveway, but he laughs and picks it up with a gloved hand. My dad says to me, "one day you will love someone the way they talk about it in songs and it will feel awesome". I have never been the one who says "I love you" first but I have whispered it within myself, written it down in every white space on the page before anyone said "I love you" to me and the day I saw my dad cry for the first time was the day I regretted waiting for someone to say it first. My dad's love is Lake Superior and no one knows where the bottom is. I came from that water and I've learned that anyone who swims in it and drowns spent too much time kicking and not enough floating. Not that I don't kick, because if anyone is a product of their parents I have spent just as much time mirroring his short temper as I have loving him. So when I tell my dad that not every woman is special, I do not mean that they are unworthy, I mean that they do not really know how deep the water is and they do not know how not to care that they will never reach the bottom. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west and if you catch the stars in between you can trace my dad's arteries, as goofy and unstrung as they are, and hold them in your hand like a worn out baseball. One day there will be a woman who will hear the "I love you" like a song and she will hum it until the lake water softens her skin.

My dad is always the one who says "I love you" first and he always means it.