"Searching for My Love"

## One

*Three hits of a floor tom*. 

I would sit in the middle seat of our rusting Subaru, my feet perched on the hump of the car’s floor. I would tap my hand on the seat between my legs. I want to remember if my dad is driving here, but the memory is dim. 

I want to remember a lot of him. There are bits and pieces:

I. Breakfast on Saturday mornings. Crispy bacon and perfectly fried potatoes. Overcooked scrambled eggs. He was a conductor of an orchestra of stainless steel pans. I hated yolks but asked for over-easy eggs. I would dip my bacon and toss the leftovers.

II. Ma yells at me for using the word “Homie.” Turns to Dad, “Is he getting that bullshit from you?” she says. “No,” dad says. “See, this is the kind of shit you bring home. Where’d you hear that, Timothy?” 

“The Ninja Turtles,” I say and start to cry. 

III. His sweaty hands on a shifter. We wait on the wrong side of a building for Ma. I tell him this is the right place. I am sure of it. I have been here with her so many times before. But she never comes out of the door. It is not the correct side of the building.

Memory is made of faulty machinery. You pull out cords from the switchboard, criss cross and confuse the cables, connect them back to the wrong plugs.  They all fit wherever they are placed. You don’t even have to make them fit. So the cords stay right where you misplaced them. 

Lines misconnected. 

Ma gets in the car. An hour too late. 

Someone reaches their hand out to the volume knob. Turns Bobby Moore so loud, no one person can hear the other. 

## Two

*I’m searching, searching for my baby. Yes I am.*  

“Ohhhhhh,” Ma belts out with a smile. “That’s me and your daddy’s song.

“Bust out the straight shots.” 

A vacuum handle in one hand, she places the other on her side, where muscle and bone bleed through her tan shirt. I can see the shape of her.

She dances along, sliding one foot across my tiled floor. 

“Turn it up, mijo!” she says. 

When they talk now, she calls my father *mijo* as well. He picks up shifts at a discount store, stocking the shelves with cheap home goods. He owns a cat that he ties to a tree outside his duplex apartment. He is clean and divorced. 

“How do you know what songs to play?” Ma asks me.

“I don’t,” I lie to her. “The computer chooses them.”

## Three

*I’m searching, searching for my love.* 

I wonder about the person who invented erasable ink. 1979. I wonder if he had a desk, if she wore a pantsuit to work each day.  I wonder for how long she tooled, for how many days he mixed whatever it is that ink is made from. 

What did the tests look like? Papers etched with words, phrases, sentences. Some half faded. Some— the failed prototypes— remain a deep black. 

But there’s one. The corner of the page. The word *sunflower* has been half erased. Charcoal-colored rubber remnants splayed out. The excitement got to her; he couldn’t wait to show his colleagues. 

*I think I got it.*

Millions were likely spent. Hundreds of thousands, surely. Ream upon ream of paper, from wood, from trees, from dirt. Overtime hours and Saturday mornings. The lights in the building would go off at a certain hour every night. It would be something they could never attach their name to. 

The time. Converted to seconds. Overwhelmed them. 

All to make something only *look* permanent. 

## Four

*I’m searching for the one I adore.* 

“You have to understand, Timothy: how I love your daddy is just very different.” Ma says this as we drive through the Angeles Forest, the cut-through road we take to my sister’s house in Palmdale. These winding roads, when I was six years old, unsettled my stomach; I vomited out of the back window of a rental car. Fourteen now, and my stomach is more well equipped.

I know why she feels this conversation necessary. After an extra whiskey and water on ice the night before, she made a call to Dad. Expressed sympathies to him perhaps ten years too late. *I love and miss you so much, mijo.*

“I get it, Ma,” I say. But this exchange feels more for her than for me. 

I think about it too often. Dad and his phencyclidine pills in the park. He’d come home fucked and stay in the garage, wait it out for Ma to leave for work, avoiding her eyes and words. Two pointed fingers at his face. On weekends, Ma drinks enough strawberry wine coolers to remember how to dance. Leaves me in my sister’s room while oldies boom in the backyard. Ma packs the house up into a truck when I turn seven and puts the old dog to sleep. *He’d never be able to handle the move,* she tells me.

If there are an infinite number of universes, is there a universe in which my father kicks the habit and continues to build airplanes? Is there a universe where his hair never grays? Is there a universe where my mother stops counting how many times she wipes the legs of our dining room table for dust? Is there a universe with a fix? One where the house on Almadale Avenue and its large front window are never broken? One where a plastic phone is never tossed hard enough to dent the drywall? A universe where, under bushes in my neighbor’s backyard, I don’t use action figures to create a new family. A turtle and a newscaster. Their almond infant. 

Ma will drive home tonight. She will go to bed at 8PM after three whiskey and waters. She will lie on the opposite end of a California King from her now husband. He will snore.

The universe we have is the one that we have. There’s a void of gravity between. 

## Five

*And if I find her, you know I will, I’ll never never let her go. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.* 

“Every object in space exerts a gravitational pull on every other.” 

*Every* object. 

Without this pull, we would all be floating. Physics 101. 

What an image. 

How long would it take to get used to the floating? Would there some peace in knowing that we would be taken wherever we would? That we would be free from connection to the ground. No place steady to set our feet.

A panic might set in. We might long for the force. 

“Every object in space exerts a gravitational pull on every other. So gravity influences the paths taken by everything traveling through space.”

We have no say in the attraction. The gravity. It traps oxygen. Traps water. Traps dirt. Traps our bodies. Holds them all to the Earth. 

Like a well-meaning god. Clumped and dirty hair like ours. She holds us together so much as she can. She hovers her hands around the speckled universe she’s forged, trying desperately to keep it all in place. Beads of sweat down her brow. She shakes. She looks in the mirror and groans just like us. Her hair grays like ours. The muscles under her skin retreat and create ridges on her face. She wonders if her thoughts belong to her or belong to synapses and neurotransmitters. She wonders what is her and what is not. She sometimes spends an extra hour in bed.

She works alone.

She wakes up and holds us in place. *Stay there, child.* she says, floating her palms around us. *Stay there.*