How High We Go in the Dark

by Sequoia Nagamatsu

She was always talking about how the unknown past would save us. For a scientist, she dreamed more like a poet or a philosopher.”

You saw a future of dead soil and dead oceans, all of us fighting for our lives. You had a vision of what life would be like for future generations and acted like the planet had a gun to our head. And maybe it does.

Maybe tonight I’ll look at the stars and make up a new constellation for the both of us, a woman standing at the precipice of a great chasm. I’ll be here with you. Love, Your father

“Opportunities are like little seeds floating in the wind. Your life is there. Some people have a big net to collect them all. Other people need to pray that the right seeds, the best ones, make their way to them with just enough bad ones to appreciate the good.”

We’ve had this argument before—with him trivializing my work because I’m not doing CPR in the back of an ambulance or listening to someone’s last words. But the dead speak as well.

My engineer father once told me that marriage and who you fall in love with are largely a matter of chance, chemicals, and how far you’re willing to drive.

I orbited my family and all of you like a distant planet—there and yet nearly impossible to reach.

You told me sometimes people and places serve a purpose for a finite amount of time to help you think and grow and love and then you move on.

I remembered her telling us magical stories about how she had a recurring dream of being a baby and someone raising her tiny body into a dark sky and letting her float away into space.