I put on your old watch. "Like father like son." ( —Not quite.) It is too big. I took a few links out but I'm leaner. All of the windows are open and the quiet fragments of unasked questions linger. I think I lost them in the newly occupied rooms of houses strangers now call home. Like an attic with limited storage space, I arrogantly discarded the opportunity to inherit your more worldly possessions —as though I believed your thoughts and memories weren't even worth it; like they would have been clutter. Unusable. But we are still too much alike. Every year I find more of you in my mirror. In my house. Downtown. At the dock.

Will I love my future children the way you loved me?

Mom still wakes up at 5:30, did you know? She makes me tea, and gives me a look she used to give you. I can see that she is afraid that I am becoming increasingly unreachable; that she is watching history repeat itself. She read it in your cards, and I guess she read it in mine too.

"You are so much like him," she'll fuss. She'll ask me to cut my hair for the hundredth time. "He liked that too," when I breathe in fresh air. Her garden was your favorite place in the world. "You know, your father..."

—She's getting married soon, but I can see that she still misses you. Your name is still on her lips, but she keeps them pursed to take a slow sip of her too-hot drink. She doesn't want to burn herself on the memory of you.