Difference: 1 year

December 27, 2004:

...crap. I just realized I never called my dad on Christmas day. He must feel like I'm slipping further and further away from him. I don't know how to relate to him much anymore. I see the relationship [my girlfriend] has with her dad, and for the first time in a long time, I'm envious. My dad is a loving and caring man, but he's rigid in his religion. And even though he doesn't say much in the way of how he believes I've "chosen" to live my life, I can see it in the way that he looks at me...like he's losing me...like the older he gets and the closer he gets to dying, the closer he gets to the last time he'll ever see me because I didn't live my life "good enough" to get to his afterlife. And it makes me sad that he thinks this way.

December 27, 2005:

My dad's so tired lately. Can't get up for even short periods of time without becoming out of breath quickly. Has to rest between getting dressed and putting his shoes on and walking out the door to the car when I take him anywhere. Sometimes he still talks about recovering and being able to work, but I think he's fighting a losing battle with himself. I think the part of him that hopes he'll recover is slowly fading away. The part of him that knew he was going to recover has already died. And the part that's taking over is the part with the cancer. The part that tells him his life is over and he better just sit back and relax, wait to die.

I'm sad. I’m mad. I'm frustrated. I have this aching in my soul to just be normal again. To just find normal and stick with it for a while. To stop finding these places in my life that are so uncomfortable and painful. I don't care how much I’m going to learn from this whole experience; I just want it to be over. I don't want to learn anymore, I just want my dad to be well again. I wish I could believe that God will come and save him from this pain, take away this cancer and let him live 50 more years. But I can't. I don't. I won't.

Researching a memoir isn't like researching a novel or any other random article. I'm not reading about someone else, I'm reading about me. What's odd about that is that sometimes I feel like I'm reading about someone else. Both of these spaces feel so so far away from me now. Sure, it's 4 and 5 years ago (could it be? no....), and while I can vaguely recollect feeling those things, the fact that life is so different now makes it feel like I'm reading from someone else's journals.

Makes me think about how much things change in a year, how much people change, and how much I've changed. One year to the next it's hard to see, but only if we don't look.