Friday in Baltimore

I did not write for a while. Do not ask me why. Perhaps I thought you were not reading. Or perhaps that time had become for you what it is now for your grandmother: just irrelevant. I can call her twice in a day or once a week, she is always happy I called and does not recall the last one.
I did not write for a while. I can come up with many reasons, which do not really matter.
I was half watching the TV a few minutes ago and there was an ad for Father’s Day. You know I never cared about such things, except when you gave me a card and ran away giggling. I remember once you even gave me Pita’s card saying “She does not know how to give you a card”. It read “Paws to you” and you had signed her name for her. With the handwriting of an eight-year old. I think I still have it somewhere.
So, I was half-watching TV when the ad came up. It was a little girl giving a card to her dad and running away, hiding behind the door watching him open it. I then realized that I had not written to you for a while.
… Your brother is now a man, my love. He is taller, stronger than I am. He is not the little boy you protected and who did not know you were doing so. He is now gone to College, as you would have gone, if some codes in you had not lost their minds.
And we have a new dog. Pita left us soon after you did. Dogs are like that – they follow those they love, everywhere. The new dog is 6 years old now, and he is a good dog. And it has been 6 years since you left us. Six years in a month.
Maybe time has become for you what time becomes when I do not write to you for a while. It becomes lonely; it forgets the count of its seconds. Or firsts. Its priorities. Time becomes just a passage and a passing. I do not know any of these, but I hope that Pita found her way. That you can read my notes when I do not write them. That your brother, really understands what he tattooed on his right arm “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional”. He tattooed that line under your name, on his right arm. Maybe one day he will find out if that is true or not.
It will be July soon, the month you were born, the month you died. I wanted to write before then, in case you can still read what I do not write.