Her Hands His Eyes is a journal written in real time about writing my book. Every week I open the box a little further. A memory. A photograph. A recipe. This is Entry 8. Start from the beginning with Entry 1. You are reading this as I write it. When the book is ready you will be the first to know. Open The Box.
This was a hard week to write.
I have been sitting at my desk with four slides in front of me and I keep stopping. Not because the words are not there. Because every time I look at these four images something lands on me that I was not expecting.
Three people on the same morning.
All of them not knowing what was coming.
I cannot stop thinking about that.
The Four Slides
Four images. The same moment. Four times he pressed the shutter.
A silhouette. Pigtails. A dress. A little girl standing at a terminal window looking at a plane.
That little girl was me.
And I was so excited I could barely stand still. I thought we were going on an airplane. A journey. An adventure. I had absolutely no idea what that morning meant. No idea what America would mean. No idea that the people I was waving at I would not see again for years. Some of them forever.
I was six. I was excited about the airplane.
That innocence. That is what stops me every time I look at these slides. That is what has been sitting on my chest all week while I try to write about it.
She did not know.
“He just kept his eyes open and recorded what six year old me could not yet carry.”
Three People. Three Unknowns.
This week I have been thinking about all three of us on that morning.
Me. My mother. My father.
I was excited about the airplane. That part I have told you. But what I keep coming back to this week is what the other two were carrying.
My mother was leaving everything she had ever known. Her country. Her language. Her mother. Her sisters. The red earth of Kamphaeng Phet. The Ping River. She did not know what America would mean for us. Nobody did. She was crossing an ocean with a six year old who was excited about the airplane and she did not know what waited on the other side.
She crossed it anyway.
And my father.
Twelve years in Vietnam and Thailand. The war. Then staying. Living there. Building something there. And now leaving it too. Just like his daughter standing at the window. He was going back to an America that had changed while he was gone. A home that was his but felt unfamiliar. A wife. A six year old daughter he was still learning.
He did not know what waited on the other side either.
Three people on the same morning. None of them knowing what was coming.
And he stopped.
He stood behind his little girl.
He pointed his camera at her silhouette.
He pressed the shutter four times.
Because in all that uncertainty she was the one thing he was completely certain of. Her excitement. Her pigtails. Her dress. Her face turned toward the future without fear.
That is a father’s love. Finding the one certain thing in all the uncertainty and keeping it safe.
I have been sitting with that all week.
“That is love that waits.”
What This Week Cost Me
I did not expect these four slides to do what they did to me.
I thought I knew this chapter. I lived it. I was there. I was the little girl at the window.
But writing it is different from living it. Writing it means sitting with all three of us at once. Three people on the same morning. None of us knowing what we were leaving.
None of us knowing what was coming. What we would carry. What we would spend the rest of our lives finding our way back to.
He was not just taking photographs.
He was keeping what none of us knew we were leaving.
That is a father’s love.
I am still writing toward what that means.
Some things take more than one week to find the words for.
I am writing it all down.
For Remi, Samantha, Jackson, Brook, Stetson, and Charlotte.
So they know what that morning held.
So they know what a father’s love looks like when it is quiet and certain in the middle of everything that is not.
So they know she was looking at the plane.
And he was looking at her.
What Comes Next
This is Entry 8 of Her Hands His Eyes, a memoir written in real time as I open the box.
In Entry 9 the chapter I almost didn’t write. The one that took me the longest to start.
