EULOGY
I regret all the promises I’ve ever made. I regret promising my dad I’d look out for him, be his guardian angel. I regret all the promises I’ve broken. I regret the receipts I’ve kept. I regret the receipts I’ve ripped up, thrown in the recycling. (Do receipts go in the recycling?) I regret all the midnight texts I’ve sent to my crushes. I regret the homework I’ve done in other classes. I regret picking all Cs on the Scantron for the quiz on the periodic table. I regret getting 57% on that quiz. I regret the homework I should’ve done.
I regret shoving past Carolina Martinez for the last slice of pizza at Mr. Arnold’s third grade class pizza party. I regret swimming in the pool without goggles to protect my eyes from the sting of chlorine. I regret the comfortable silence on the long car ride from Los Angeles to Phoenix. I regret the radio stations that filled the silence. I regret collecting the commemorative copper coins you get from turning the crank on those machines that engrave their designs into blank brown disks, once pennies. I have no use for metaphorical junk drawers, yet here I am, filling them.
I regret not hugging my dad that Sunday.
He had tears in his eyes. He was hugging one of the church’s King James Version bibles, one with a red faux leather cover. He was standing up at his seat at the flank of the spirit medium’s chair, face contorted like he’d made himself a cup of calamansi lemonade but forgot the sugar.
“How are we going to pay for your college? How are we going to pay?” He seemed to be asking God, the other churchgoers having avoided eye contact with him.
On the banner, Jesus’s hands were outstretched in what I assumed was meant to be a comforting gesture. I interpreted it as a shrug. Then my dad shook like the mediums did when they spoke in tongues, fingers trembling like a plucked harp string, only his eyes were red, and tears streamed down his cheeks. He removed his wiry black glasses and rubbed his eyes.
Me? I just stood there.
I regret letting the offer to date that boy in ninth grade expire. I regret writing a poem about him five years later. About how he and his boys made bets on whether he could get me to third base. I regret sending that poem to fifty lit mags. I regret publishing it. He didn’t deserve to be immortalized.
I regret taking aesthetic photos whenever the family went out for dinner at a restaurant that wasn’t Burger King or McDonalds or Lucky Red Buffet. I regret posting said photos on Instagram, obsessing over whether I’d reached the optimal number of likes. I regret cracking fortune cookies. I regret reading fortune cookies. I regret keeping fortunes as bookmarks. I don’t believe in that baloney.
I regret believing in compatibility sites that used my name and his, fed them through secret algorithms, and spit out a percentage chance whether we were good matches for each other. Mr. Ninth Grade got an abysmal 17%, but I still timed our encounters in the hall, that intricate dance of schedules and synchronized locker glances. I regret not learning how to drive as soon as I could get my license. Maybe if I could drive, I could escape my perpetual state of waiting.
One day in tenth grade, next to the John Adams Senior High auditorium, under the shadow of that great big Gothic brownstone, I sat with my dark purple Jansport and a black hard shell guitar case covered in stickers from Etsy shops boasting pithy quotes as “Hydrate or Diedrate” and “My Other Guitar Is A Strat.” The breeze ruffled the evergreens, scattering pinecones and needles to the ground.
I heard a familiar car honk. Looked up and saw my parents’ white 2018 Toyota Highlander. The door unlocked. I got in. Dangling from the front mirror was one of those ubiquitous tree car fresheners. Miniature tree. Fake pine scent. The classical station, KUSC 91.5 FM, was on the radio instead of the usual pop hit radio Dad and I liked. 104.3 MYfm. Mom was in the front seat.
“Why didn’t Dad pick me up today?”
Mom kept her eyes on the road. We drove for a while in silence, past identical houses, past rows of parked cars, past suicide bridge. I thought it was pretty, with the white faux marble columns. Corinthian. There was no mistaking those ornate curls, like I imagined leaves sprouting from a young palm tree. I regret thinking it wasn’t a bad place to die. We passed by graffiti in red that said, “Wake Up, Angeles” with a black halo and red horns over “Angeles.” I’d memorized every landmark on the drive to and from our little apartment in North Hollywood. This was new.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“You’re going to Auntie Evelyn’s,” she said. “I’m going to see your dad.”
“Where is he?”
She kept driving.
“Is he sick, ma?”
She met my eyes in the mirror as we hit a red light, and the car came to a stop.
“Yes, my child. Dad’s sick so he got in big trouble.” She frowned and shook her head, getting lost in her thoughts. The light turned green, and after we didn’t budge, a barrage of honks descended upon us. “Screw all of you, damn it!” She pounded her fist against the center of the steering wheel, the car emitting a loud, long beep. I spent the rest of the day watching my cousins have a one-handed pushup contest and doing homework. I regret doing the homework.
I regret being a lousy guardian angel.
The spirit medium had told me that my dad and I were siblings in another life. I was the older soul. I half-believed her. (Sometimes it’s easier to believe.) I took on my role as an older sibling and looked out for him. Gave him my extra portions of rice during meals. Listened when he vented his frustrations about the engineers at work and his fellow assemblers. Greeted him with a hug every evening when he got home. I cared for him and yet also wished for a replacement, like that one Disney cartoon where two orphans answer an ad for substitute parents. I wasn’t praying for a daredevil dad, just someone who could get us out of this working-class hell.
I regret meeting Gordon Ramsey at Paramount Studios. I regret putting my phone down during his big, motivational speech to us eighth graders, on the cusp of teenagerhood. Pics or it didn’t happen, they said. I was trying this new thing called living in the moment. I regret thinking Gordon Ramsey would have been a better father. No more feeling ashamed on career day. Instead of a stoic middle-aged Asian guy who wore Hawaiian shirts and welded the wings of Boeing-737s for a living, I’d have a parent who could teach me some useful life skills. A television chef was surely an upgrade. A celebrity could provide.
I regret writing Dad a letter. I regret looking him up by his inmate code: JS35DH462. Writing the address. Buying the purple heart postage stamp, like he served in the U.S. Air Force instead of the Pinoy equivalent. Hallmark hadn’t come up with a greeting card for that. Thus, the letter. I regret never sending the letter. I regret all the letters I never sent. I regret all the letters I received.
A month after that drive past suicide bridge, my mom was sitting in the living room, on our corduroy couch, one leg crossed over another. Her prayer book was open in her hands. She was reading aloud. I was sitting diagonally from her, on the family computer, a Dell PC that was a few years old. Black and sleeker than the Windows 97 model of my childhood. My earbuds were in, but no sound came through them. I had Facebook open, with its chronological feed and integrated Messenger app. It was my best friend and cousin Jacob who had told me that my father was in jail for alleged attempted robbery. Through Facebook fucking Messenger. That’s how I found out my dad was in jail. Not through a phone call. Not through Mom. Thank God, not the news. The local Fox affiliate was brutal in their news segment, calling him a “delusional nutcase.” That’s the video Jacob had sent me after a week had passed. He had texted, “I didn’t want to stress you out, but you have to see this.”
The knock came, firm and inevitable. My mom laid flat on the couch, remained silent as if they were annoying trick-or-treaters on Halloween night. I opened the door, and one of the L.A. County sheriff’s cronies greeted me.
“Is your mom home, kiddo?”
“I’m a teenager.” I glanced back at my mother laying on the couch, eyes shut. “Why?”
“I have news she’d probably want to hear.”
I shook my mom’s shoulder. The silence thickened like a sauce, peppered by the ticking of the gold clock hanging in the kitchen. She squeezed my hand, a signal that meant she sensed danger.
“Mrs. Aganad?”
She squeezed my hand tight, her stubby lilac-painted fingernails creating dull indents in my skin.
“Your husband has sustained a traumatic brain injury while under our care. He is currently in the ICU.”
“What exactly happened? Can we see him?” my mom said.
“You’ll have to follow me.”
I regret not visiting my dad before his coma.
I regret being a lousy guardian angel.
I regret breaking up with my best friend over assumptions.
I regret making up with my best friend over assumptions. I regret all the fights I’ve picked. I regret venting to my best friend. I regret venting about my best friend. I regret all the people I’ve unfollowed. I regret unfollowing people then following them again, as if our status on social media indicated anything about our relationship. I regret stalking my crushes on Instagram. I regret liking his old post from 2014. “His” referring to all my high school fixations, pre and post The Event. They’re all the same boy, in hindsight, with their coiffed hair and Stevia tongues. They’d kissed me and it tasted like fake sugar in the wake of Dad’s death, a temporary salve, no replacement for honey.
I regret that I only cared about mass incarceration when my dad became an inmate. I regret that I was more interested in boys than criminal justice reform. I regret being a lousy guardian angel. I regret that I cared what he said in his group chats without me. About my criminal father. Was crazy inherited? I regret not schooling him in proper etiquette. Don’t speak ill of the dead. I regret that I no longer care that I never got to date him. The boy in ninth grade who made bets on my virginity. (This story might be more interesting, if I did care.)
I regret being a lousy guardian angel, even though I no longer believe in that bullshit. Promises are promises. Regrets are regrets. I regret ever trying to replace you with Gordon Ramsey, receipts, radio silence, midnight texts, the boy in ninth grade, the boys in tenth, eleventh, and twelfth. Time and regret have taught me: Boys are interchangeable parts. You are the engine and the frame. Without you, the machine falls apart. Which machine? Mama? My heart? I regret I didn’t realize sooner. I could have written this into your eulogy.
Rayne Alarcio, 23, Long Beach, California - USA ✯ IG: @raynealarcio ✯ raynealarcio.com
“Rayne Alarcio (they/them) was born and raised in sunny Los Angeles, California. Their poetry and prose are published or forthcoming in two award-winning WriteGirl anthologies, The Lumiere Review, Rogue Agent, Exposition Review, at LAX's Terminal 7-8, and elsewhere. They are a 2019 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Silver Medalist in Short Story and once opened for internationally-touring slam poet Caroline Rothstein.”