I sometimes forget hours exist – sometimes. They become muddled in the disorder of seconds, which I count in my head up to the thousands, ten thousands, but never hundred thousands.

Three thousand thirty-three, thirty-four, and forty-thousand once I am consumed by the foundations of life: my dad’s hair and the way it curls and the lexicon of my and Marco’s eyes.

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My father has the same hair he had when he was a little boy, which, evidently, is the same hair of many others who had the same last name in a different year. Loose little brown curls frame his head, but it only forms a ring above the top when he dreams in the shape of a semi-circle.

The first time he had those crooked hazes, he woke up with his pillow bathed in fearful sweat and short strands composing his curls shed unto the pillow. He called me into the darkness of the barely dawning light and pointed at what was once adorning his head which then rested on the soft cotton of the pillowcase.

“That,” Dad stated, “is my hair. I knew I would go bald some day, but I can tell you right now – I didn’t think it would be so soon. What am I, forty seven? I’m too young for this. My dad didn’t start to lose his hair until he was sixty, and even then, you could only tell if you glued your eyes to the skin showing on his scalp.”
Despite the frequency my father’s fears of visible age vocalized, I found myself lacking the wistful recollection of the past with days of thick curls from all degrees of the head or dreadful visions of no curls whatsoever. The present balance of his wishes and fears – the developing, bare circle in the middle of his head – comforted me. I imagined it as some hereditary hat and some lineage always present.

So I was silent. I allowed his complaints to continue, but bestowed upon myself silence as he spoke, his eyebrows knit and the already-established crease folding like the spine of a book. I averted my eyes to the hair on his pillow and rehearsed all the ways to reassure him my comfort in familial history was the best one to assume.

I can’t say my rehearsals ever translated into something audible.

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Marco is my best friend, so much so that I cannot imagine breathing air he has not inhaled before.
When we were in the third grade, our teacher tried to imitate a type of prejudice in class (only most of us were Hispanic, so the reality didn’t extend beyond socio-economic difference), and segregated each of us due to eye color.

“Alright, y’all! Brown eyes over here on the right, beside the board. Kids with colored eyes, go to the left where the doorway is.”

The glob of students dispersed, each at least five-sixths directed towards the right side of the room where their like-eyed peers huddled in solidarity. My reddish-brown eyes, the kind of red-brown of a brick, focused on the board as Marco trailed behind me.

His loyalty was never something I questioned. Actually, it was never something I noticed until our teacher said, “Marco, quit following Ana! You don’t have brown eyes, do you?” Marco shrugged. His excuse: he didn’t know the color of his eyes. “I don’t own any mirrors in my house,” he said. “My brother broke one when he got mad, so my mom took them out of the house,” he added, only everyone pretended they were deaf for that sentence.
Our teacher sighed, and just said, “Ana, would you tell me what color Marco’s eyes are? You’re around him pretty often anyways – you would know.”

Except I didn’t, and I was a terrible friend for not knowing the color of Marco’s eyes until I turned around and saw a color reminiscent of honey not attached to the comb or suspended by a spoon over steam lines from tea, but honey pooled at the bottom of a plastic bear. He was some extension of me as he blinked twice, and I knew the words that never left his mouth. They varied in phrasing, but had essentially the same meaning: don’t leave me.

“Brown,” I lied, and that was it. We were a union before we were an intersection.

The communication we developed that day was more than fleeting desperation or a handshake created from jealousy, because the other pairs of friends were just so much cooler with their own. It was a source of comfort for the both of us. No matter the increasing amount of vocabulary tests, nothing was retained or put to good use as words began to fail us and eyes accomplished what was most important. One word, however, was employed somewhere.

I was thirteen when I saw the word called lexicon. Immediately, my eyes fixated on the slants forming its x, and I could not look away. It met at no other points than the one joining it, and never repeated; it only existed (coincidentally, in the same way we did). I wrote it in italics and thought of it in the same slanted script every time Marco spoke to me with his face. His eye rolls when the privileged kids opened their mouths, his unblinking eyes when he hated the world to which he had been born in and the people the good Lord gave him, his dilated pupils every last Thursday of the autumn months when he thought he loved me – lexicon.

I considered making a dictionary for that dialect, but I decided against it. Recognition is easy enough.

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Dad is combing his hair in one of the many mirrors of our new house. While he wasn’t watching, I looked at Dad’s phone and read his emails and receipts of our new life, and concluded with finality: he spent too much money on mirrors. There was one in every room, so both internal and external appearances were unsafe at any cost or speed or feeling. Now, he combs his hair in the kitchen, carefully correcting each bare spot where youth once inhabited.

“Are you ready?” I ask him. I’m dressed to go to Mass for the first time in a few years, for the first time since Mom decided she can’t be the only one of her immediate family members to go to Heaven.

He grunts. “In a minute. Will you sit or something? You’re late all the time, and I never say anything to you – I just wait. Quit hounding me,” Dad huffs, and for eleven minutes, I can’t look at him without wanting to hate him. We leave as his hair still dries from the rushed kitchen sink’s water.

My father sits in the pew in front of my mother and I because neither of us have the room (nor do we want to make the room) to accommodate him, so he sits in front of us with his head bowed for the entirety of the service. The priest’s homily consists of seven allegories for forgiveness, and when my mother whispers, “Wow. Wasn’t that so impactful?” when it finishes, I agree, even though I only heard the words, never absorbing them. I was too busy staring at the droplets of water still on my dad’s neck. I was too busy wondering what his head looked like before it began to age, because it was something straying quickly from my memory. I was too busy wondering where all his hair escapes. Sometimes it lies on his pillow when he resurrects from the heavy sleep I mistake as death at least once a month; sometimes it floats into the sink with the grace of a feather, but does not possess nearly the same amount of beauty; other times it’s attached to the plastic teeth of a comb with an appearance even finer than usual. But where does it go from there? I never see it in a trash can. Only with my wildest imagination can I see it in a plastic bag, gathered with all other memories, but that’s an impractical vision; Dad hates poor hygiene.

Once the final song sings its praise, Mom and I rise from our pew as Dad fixes his eyes towards the floor and whispers words intelligible to no one but the high power to whom he directs them. His eyes close so tightly I’m confused I’m viewing a big sleep (literally or metaphorically), and his hands clasp around each other with an intensity uncommon for a man in his middle fifties. The appearance could resemble a self-led final rite, but the curls at the bottom of my father’s balding head hold all his youth and resistance to death. As fear-inducing the halts of breathing my father employs are, it’s a thrill I find familiar every time.

I can’t really picture living any differently.

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I can’t really picture living any differently. (At least, any differently than my very-much alive father who grasps for his youth every time I think he may die.) It seems that for every one person living in satisfaction and comfort, two people don’t.

The first is Marco.

We skip stones on the ground (or hurl, to only watch a cloud of dust materialize, since the ground fails to reflect the image or the noise which water can), and Marco tells me he's leaving. My mouth opens, anticipating its next sentence or exclamation or interrogation until I see "3/3" written to fit the width of an inch along his finger. I decide my mouth is better sutured so that is conceals anything requiring punctuation or finality and nod with the slight lift of my chin.

He answers what I don’t ask anyways. “It’s not good for me anymore. Not like I can explain it, but it’s something I feel. Like…I can be better than this place if it releases my wrist first.”

“This place?” It’s apparent: I cannot stay silent. “This place?” I repeat, and by now my eyes distort every image before them in transparent blurs and water without gravity.

Marco sighs. “I thought I said it was something I can’t put into words. It’s just something that ought to be felt.”
And this place – in the dictionary, it’s five letters for either an action or a means of identification, but in my mind it is nothing I can escape, nothing I want to escape, as I envision my father’s adolescent curls happily licking his neck and my skin browning from the sun amidst a culture of red, white, and green in a red, white, and blue geography. Marco’s feeling or instinct eludes me, as mine does him.

I know - that after looking at the purple half-moons hanging below his eyes and the smeared ink prompting a date and some hope (as if it’s rested on his skin for some time) – Marco will be tangible only in thought on the fourth of March.

I look at him to acknowledge that true thought for the beginning of spring. I waste seconds on each glance, seconds I value above anything in the world or in this place. I look at his own hair, to see if it parallels his age, and it’s maturing with a speed I have never noticed. He has dull gray flecks in some spots, but they look like silver threads if the sun is so kind to shine on him. I look at his skin, and he’s pale and white and I can see his arm laced with green veins, and of course, March the third. His eyes have darkened, too – maybe to an almond hue.

Marco’s a new face, but he’s recognized nostalgia, and I haven’t forgotten the language of blinking and staring from our first time period.

But he’s still my best friend from the third grade, and he still breathes the same chemical compounds I do for the remaining weeks he’s in my world. I selfishly remember the honey of a plastic bear his eyes stole and the tanned skin of summers and Mexico and childhood. I think about how that is still my world, but has not been his since that image has been present, and how he cannot fix the lens with which he views his surroundings on the past (at least the good parts). I make something tangible besides a thought and kiss him on the cheek. His skin is still soft. There’s something that hasn’t matured. Marco smiles sadly at me as he presses his palm against mine and says, “I’ll miss you. You’re alright, you know?”

I doubt his return.

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The second is my father. I have never seen him display the freedom Marco has in discomfort – the kind proudly shown, with the date of departure scrawled hurriedly on the side of a finger so that few will notice, and those who do will not forget. He demonstrates his hesitant, almost apologetic disassociation in his lamentations of lost hair. Dad yearns for an old place and time.

His satisfaction lives in retrospect. In the yellowing faded photographs from the eighties with “Andy – Summer ‘84” written in my mother’s hurry script on the back. His hairline recedes with a squint, but lengthens with a glance a few steps back. Even so, my eyes would not find it first; his smile premieres above all other features. Dad’s teeth have the imperfections of a third-world childhood in a first-world country – a gap between the two front teeth, a crowd on the bottom row, and one small chip on one of those prominent teeth if you knew him so well to see it. I didn’t notice it until a year ago. His mouth opens widely, and he laughs without fear of wrinkle lines revealing age.

I love him for the audible revelry. My mother’s hair probably frizzes behind the camera with the humidity of the Texas sun as the singed hair from her perm sticks up like a rooster’s feathers. He laughs and she laughs, and they rejoice in their mutual imperfections – his damaged teeth, her damaged hair. She halts for the picture time would later tarnish, but he continues to laugh and stare and fall in love with her.

That picture does not translate into the new millennium, except on Thursday nights. Thursday nights, we clean ourselves of Tuesday’s damages and anticipate Friday’s release on responsibility. We dine on the inner west side of town, where the people are ours and dangers are only such to visitors. The food is Mexican, but the cheese is American. We ride the short distance home until Dad breaks silence with a comment on the issues NPR discussed, which he follows with a joke to lighten the blow of reality. My mother laughs, but stops so that she can make her own. She laughs with no restraint, and my dad looks at her with the same abandon. I watch him fall in love with her all over again. I watch the bald spots on his head lessen until patches of hair disguise the skin. I watch the teeth from his childhood return after the inconvenience of adult braces and tight-lipped smiles, and all the pain of poor nourishment of neglect he cannot leave behind. I watch him pray for his Thursday love to exist for eternity.

When we get home, I lie between my mother and father on the bed too large for the two of them together – hell, even too large for the three of us – and remember what I’ll tell my children or readers or listeners of their eulogies. I do not forget Dad’s fluttering eyelashes as he enters the crooked slumbers that leave him missing hair in the morning. I do not forget the rise and fall of his chest I check every couple of minutes I remember they exist to ensure he is alive. I do not forget the soft rhythm of snores my mother establishes after she too knows my father lives. After I hark all observations of the present to become memories, I retreat to the warmth of my Thursday bed and write them down on a tissue with a ballpoint pen. I look at them on Friday as the dread for Monday commences.

On Saturdays we sleep during the day. I walk into his room every half hour to ensure he still lives to die.
Sundays after Mass, Dad drives me home since Mom goes to the cemetery with her sisters to lay a yellow rose upon her father’s grave. I one time asked Dad why the rose was a cheery yellow and not the burning death of orange or absolution of white.

“I don’t really know,” he said, “but I don’t think your mom would, either. When your grandfather was dying, he told your mom and her sisters he wanted yellow roses, and nothing else. The funeral home was instructed to trash any arrangement with white or orange or pink or red or – God forbid – dyed. Your mom hated that. She hated watching people lift their heads from their rosaries to check that their condolences could be displayed, only to lower them in confusion.”

I figured it was because yellow roses encouraged good health and my grandfather encouraged irony, until I saw another photograph aged by even more time than the one that had stained my dad’s smile. On the back, slow and careful handwriting identified “Elena + Ricky – 1956.” They stood stiffly before a cake, but only for the picture. In Elena’s eyes were the hopes of the next lifetimes she would live alongside another being, and in her hand was a single yellow rose. “May this marriage be of good health,” my grandfather would have said in the toast, displacing the yellow rose from the vase into the hands of his wife.

On the most recent Sunday, I told Dad without context, “The yellow rose reminds Grandpa of his wife. I suppose he felt most at home in her presence.”

“As he should,” he responded. He lowered his head to see his bald spot in the mirror and turned his key for home with only some hesitation.

      ---------------------

Marco left yesterday. As advanced our language was, nothing in his eyes could have revealed what he sought specifically. I only know he wishes to identify his own foundations of life.

As he should. I maintain mine. My dad maintains half: the hair has vanished, but my mother remains. His prayers fit somewhere in the seconds.

Forty-thousand and one, forty-thousand and two, forty-thousan