Written By: Lauren Howard
I'm hugging a book right now.Â
It's not even my book.Â
I have barely been able to look away in the last 24 hours since it landed on my desk.Â
I have been in the very, very early stages of figuring out what to do with this book I kind of accidentally wrote. I didn't set out to write a book, but my hands started tapping at the keyboard one day and, a few weeks later, there was an actual, honest-to-god manuscript. I can't really tell you how except tap tap tap from the fingies and poof.Â
It ended up being about my dad, though I don't know if that was part of the plan. It's about missing him, missing him while he was still here, and all of the things that he did to make me worried about missing him before he even left.Â
It sounds like a downer but it's funny, I promise.
It sat for a while like this unfinished piece of me that didn't have a place to go. I didn't really think it ever would have one.Â
Then, Cindy Gallop told me to stop being a chicken sh!t and do something with it and, well, I'm not one for questioning Cindy Gallop.Â
So here we are - a fourth draft of a book I didn't even mean to write.
Our nanny (who we call our oldest child) walked into my office yesterday and said that she got me something and held out a padded package.Â
She is one of the few people in the world that I have allowed to set eyes on the book.Â
I eyed her suspiciously but took it. I burst into tears as soon as I took a peek inside.Â
It wasn't my book, no. That would have been suspiciously fast.Â
Instead, she tracked down one of the few existing copies of a textbook my dad wrote many years ago. It was briefly used in law schools to educate on the overlap between addiction medicine and forensic medicine. I didn't even realize it existed anymore because it's been out of print for years.Â
And now it's here, sitting next to me, as the tiniest gesture of the type of love that he would have absolutely tried to show.
I am navigating this new world that I know literally nothing about except to say "I wrote this thing and I am trusting you strangers with a piece of my heart," and he's now sitting here on the desk next to me as I do it.Â
I just have something in both of my eyes.Â
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