Why I Wrote THIS Wednesday #42: "Fine. But I'm Coming Right After. Don't Go to Sleep Yet."

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There is a line in tomorrow’s piece that I said to my father over the phone, a few hours before he died.

“Fine. But I’m coming right after. Don’t go to sleep yet.”

I have carried that sentence for almost thirty years. It is the last promise I made him. I did not keep it. Not because I chose not to. Because he was already gone by the time the game ended.

I have written the day my father died before. Echo 24 was the driveway. The line of cars I recognized before I reached the front door. The walk from the car to the house that felt like miles.

That piece was about what I saw when I arrived.

This one is about what happened before.

The phone call. The locker room. The game itself, which remains the strangest forty minutes of my life. Something happened on that court that I have never been able to explain. I was not the best player on the team. I was never the most dominant player in any game I played. But that night, the game slowed down in a way it never had before. I was untouchable. I was carried.

I did not know why until I got home.

He died at 5:30. That was tip-off.

Tomorrow’s piece is about a game I won and a promise I lost. I wrote the game scene myself this time. Present tense. From the jump ball to the buzzer. Because some things need to be written from inside the body that lived them.

This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

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