In Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a character notices a hairline fracture in the plaster above his bed. Over days it lengthens until the ceiling gives way. It foreshadows the angel’s arrival at the end of Millennium Approaches. It's a visible breach between the earthly and the divine.

That’s what the ceiling outside our upstairs bathroom looked like when we rushed to the hospital to wait for you to be born. While we were gone, Grandpa Schmidt knocked it down. Years later he and your mom put up drywall, removed the old boob lights she hated, and left it half-finished—bare bulbs, missing trim, gaps in the paneling. This summer your mom and I finally (mostly) finished it.

I’m still embarrassed by the state of our house in Champaign. 

So many projects are half-completed or waiting to be started. My parents’ house always felt immaculate by comparison in hindsight. I still remember how out of place a hole in the wall felt at the Vos house or my cousin Josh’s. Though I do remember when my parents had the kitchen floor replaced. It took years before the baseboards went in. Work my dad intended to do himself. He bought machines to cut the wood, and eventually he used them. The house was finished and sold, but on a much longer timeline than he intended, decades. The Jaguar, dismantled in 1989, has sat so long he can no longer see well enough to fix it.

We had big plans for this summer. T-shirts, masks, Elden Ring cosplay—things we meant to do together. I also planned to release new Daz projects, the first in years. None of it got done. We came up short across the board. Mom planned to walk laps in the pool, finish the retaining wall in the back yard. We didn’t bike once. We didn’t teach you to tie your shoes. 

There just wasn’t enough time.

What we did manage: we ran nearly every day. We went to the pool, where you often made a friend for the trip. I told you not to stack big rocks. I thought you’d break your foot, and once you almost did. You took D&D and Fiber Arts at Parkland. You gamed online, so much gaming online. We argued about the value of real people.

We went to the movies. Superman twice, Fantastic Four, Jurassic Park in recliners, Elio, and a rerelease of Shin Godzilla. That was a special surprise, we even went to AMC for it.

I don’t know what you’ll remember. 

Movies don’t feel like memories, maybe just me shushing you. But it was something we did together.  And if you do remember that, the shushing, know that I’m torn on it.  You seem to have the urge to talk through a whole movie or show sometimes.  And I see you using those experiences as an opportunity to make connections and be heard.  I see you reaching out.  I value the conversations we have.  I also sometimes want to actually experience the thing that we’re watching.  You’d think the more important thing would be obvious.  Hindsight is 20/20.

We traveled this summer. The Smoky Mountains, Indianapolis, Kansas City for a wedding, we went to St. Louis for the Magic House. You wanted to stop at a cave, so we did. We panned for rocks. In the Smokies, we took it slower than the year before, when we packed in one or two big excursions every day. Some days we just stayed at the cabin or the pool. 

You made another friend there, for the day, a guy who talked an awful lot about frame rates and flavors of gummy candies.

You saw Hatfields and McCoys with Mom and came back with a toy gun and a wearable blanket you still use. Roz might have enjoyed the show, but the seventy, one hundred dollar meal ticket would have been wasted on her.  So you got to go see it with your mom.  I would have liked to have done it with you, but it didn’t seem right to propose a trip that would have stuck someone else with the responsibility of watching Rosie.  So I took that bullet and you got to see the show.  I asked a lot about the food.  All you can eat BBQ seemed pretty appealing.  Your mom and I fancy ourselves intellectuals.  You don’t get enough opportunities to sit back and enjoy things that lack subtext.

At Dollywood, it poured when we arrived, poured, the rain returned again mid-day. We stuck it out and rode some fantastic coasters, maybe one of the smoothest we’d ever experienced. Mom and I took turns with you and Roz. We ended the night on a raft ride with geysers. We joked the last geyser might go off anywhere—even back at the cabin or at home.  There was a long fireworks and drone show.  Queen played.  You’ve got an eclectic taste in music and they’re on that list.  I imagine Good Omen’s played a role. 

At that wedding in Kansas City, the girls kept requesting K-Pop Demon Hunters songs. It had been your sister’s big thing this summer, though you’d watch it too. We saw it first together. I compared its demon king to Darkseid and Anti-Life. You said I see Darkseid everywhere, and I do. Strip away Kirby and K-Pop, and both tell the same story: a voice insisting you are nothing but your wound, that peace comes only through erasure of the self. Both stage the same fight with despair disguised as truth.

Know that I am often aware that I am the voice of anti-life, that I am the snake in the garden, what is rotten in the state of Denmark. 

This isn’t lost on me. 

My truth is not always the right truth.

Courtney Hemker had me reading The Joy Luck Club. One passage:

“O! Hwai dungsyi”—You bad little thing—said the woman, teasing her baby granddaughter. “Is Buddha teaching you to laugh for no reason?” As the baby continued to gurgle, the woman felt a deep wish stirring in her heart.

“Even if I could live forever,” she said to the baby, “I still don’t know which way I would teach you. I was once so free and innocent. I too laughed for no reason.

“But later I threw away my foolish innocence to protect myself. And then I taught my daughter, your mother, to shed her innocence so she would not be hurt as well.

“Hwai dungsyi, was this kind of thinking wrong? If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too? If I see someone has a suspicious nose, have I not smelled the same bad things?”

The baby laughed, listening to her grandmother’s laments.

“O! O! You say you are laughing because you have already lived forever, over and over again? You say you are Syi Wang Mu, Queen Mother of the Western Skies, now come back to give me the answer! Good, good, I am listening.”

“Thank you, Little Queen. Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.”

I don’t know if we’ll ever move. You and your sister talk about it. At some point I’ll need to reckon with the choice to keep you in Champaign schools when first grade stayed remote. I don’t know how to do that without making my shame into your story, stripping innocence and hope at once. I think I’m hoping that the story will change before I have to record it.

When I talk to you about friendships, it often comes out wrong. My fear turns into frustration, and frustration turns into words that shame you.

I don’t want that to be what you remember.

I had close friends through elementary school. We rode bikes, played Transformers, role-played in real life the way you’ve done on Fortnite. We sat around drawing, spent afternoons gaming. We went to the comic store and read what we bought. We collected trading cards. Then I went to high school. Those friendships didn’t carry over. I had my track and cross-country team. But the kids I’d grown up with, they changed, and I had already arrived at myself. One just moved away. I had periods of connection, but I also felt a lot of loneliness then, before eventually finding close friends again in college. Later came marriage and kids. Now, if I’m honest, I usually have one close co-worker and that’s about it. I see your mom with her group of friends. I see myself with students and colleagues. You see this too, whether you think about it or not.

I am the model for your solitude.

I look back at photos of myself—kindergarten through college—and I remember those friendships as some of the happiest times in my life. You have online friends, people you talk to and play with. You’ve made “friends for the day” at the pool or at a cave. You form connections quickly. But you haven’t yet had the kind of sustained friendships that last years, that move with you through school, that make you feel at home in a place. I miss that for you, because I know what it meant to me.

I also want to be clear, I respect where you are. You’ve found comfort with solitude decades earlier than I did. It took me years to learn how to be alone, to realize I often prefer it. You already know that.

You’ve already built worlds of your own, found joy in your interests, and carved out an identity that’s yours.

As I show  you photos from my life—before I was the person I am today, when I had need—I wish that you be able to see them the way I see them: the faces of the friends who made those years bright.

I am proud of the person you are becoming. If solitude is what makes you happy, I will try to accept that. It is ultimately what made me happy.  I just suppose that I know that I have something to compare it to? I made an informed decision? Just as I did when I ultimately rejected religion?

I also worry about my fault in the matter. 

When you were in Kindergarten we chose to keep you in Champaign schools. At Kenwood, nearly 40% of students met state goals in reading and 30% in math. Among white kids, closer to 50%. Your own scores often put you in the top 20%. I don’t know that you always feel smart, but you are.

We kept you there for the opportunities it seemed to promise. I didn’t have to leave teaching. I didn’t have to become an artist. I thought I was making the right choice for you. I tell myself I was making the choice for you, for your mom too so that she wouldn’t be the one leaving her job.  I imagine that we couldn’t just have warehoused you like others were warehoused. I tell myself that moving you to Oakwood would have meant a school where fewer than 25%—sometimes fewer than 10%—met state expectations. But you wouldn’t have lost nearly your entire first grade year. Your social development might not have been interrupted.

We prioritized education over well-being. We prioritized a school that was racially diverse, accepting of gender nonconformity, progressive in its values.

Another of the books I read this past year was The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It was one your mother read long ago and enjoyed. Kundera sets Nietzsche’s eternal return as the source of weight: if every act had to be lived again and again, it would bind us with heaviness. But our lives are once-only—einmal ist keinmal—and that is lightness, unbearable precisely because there is no return, no way to test the alternative. That’s what I think about with keeping you in Champaign: I can’t know what Oakwood would have given or taken. The choice exists once, and its meaning is fixed by the story I make of it afterward.

I still think about making the jump, before it’s too late.  You are our son.  You will be clever. You are our son.  Should we have prioritized the places where we know we are not strong?

When I look at houses online in Vermillion County, I search for sheds before I correct myself. The big ones, the kind that I used to build homecoming floats in. I still imagine a future where my parents live with us, my dad with his tools, the boat, the Corvette, the Jaguar. But he can’t see anymore. None of that’s possible. I’m shopping for a future that doesn’t exist. I never learned what he had to teach. There won’t be a time now when we work on those things together.

We maybe have one memory where I diagnosed something he would not have been able to diagnose and he did the real work.  That’s all that we have.  He wanted a son that worked on cars with him, that would sail with him.  

He got me. 

There’s a character in the book, we're back to Unbearable lightness again, that I identify with a lot. Franz, his fidelity isn’t to people so much as to ideas—to love, to causes, to the vision of himself as noble. Even in marriage, he’s loyal not to his wife but to the idea of woman. He’s faithful to the story he needs to tell about himself, not to the people he shares his life with.

I recognize the same instinct in myself. I value my idea of truth so much, but am I not dishonest? An overcommitment to imagined meanings? It’s in the letters I write you, in the way I teach, in the way I keep circling our choices. Franz wants to be remembered as good and committed; I want the same. That’s the shape my anxieties take when I think about fatherhood.

I don’t worry about whether I love you. I worry about whether you’ll remember how I love you—whether the hours and energy, the small choices and sacrifices, will add up to a story you can carry forward. These letters are my hedge against disappearance. A fidelity to the version of myself I hope you’ll one day understand—not the one who lost touch with his own old friends, or burned bridges, or disappeared from family photos,who maybe never truly loved anyone more than he loved himself, but the one who stayed with you, who watched.

I can only hope the meanings I shape around your life are more right than wrong. That might not even be the best way to think about it.  

Maybe the story just needs to do more good than harm.