One morning when I was fifteen, after I’d been up all night because it was summer vacation, I decided to experiment momentarily with what it might be like not to believe in God. I sat at the kitchen table and looked out the back window of our house, and the fleeting euphoria of staying up all night combined with our nice backyard bathed in nice sunrise-y light combined with the thought that all this might be possible without some omniscient universal consciousness who could loom up in my mind and judge me for watching scrambled porn channels to give me something like a religious experience, or the negative image of one, with all the colors reversed like the porn on the scrambled channels, but the same effect.

I felt emboldened by my newfound atheism so when my dad came out to get ready for work I told him about it.

“An atheist, huh?” he said. “I could understand being agnostic. But atheism… I dunno.” There was very little judgement in his voice. It was more like I had made a choice of car color he was pretty sure I’d come to regret later but hey, it felt flashy for now so more power to me and maybe I’d like it forever as much as I did the day I took it off the lot. 

Now it is a little more than seventeen years later and I want to say to him, Are you happy now, you bastard, you Joni Mitchell superfan, you endurer of tremendous loss who somehow kept us all more or less on the road, you early adopter, you excellent text messenger, you with the running joke of answering ‘older than dirt’ when asked how old you were turning on your birthday even though I think you might have been the age I am now when I was first old enough to voice the set-up to the joke, you gangly medium-long-haired teen in pictures we go through as we are cleaning out the garage, you quiet example, you reason I now resent every paunchy golf-shirted male baby boomer easing into retirement and reminiscing over rock’s lost ubiquity and undiminished superiority because you earned your place among their circle of folding chairs at the tailgate but you will not be joining, you easiest person for me to find a gift for, you pile of ashes in a box on my stepmom’s dresser, you battery of optimism that never dipped below ninety-eight percent, you who we still say goodnight to when the lights in what was your home go out cued by timers you set, you apparently actually good golfer? I’m pretty sure I’m an agnostic, and possibly more, and all for the corniest and least philosophical of reasons: the off-chance of seeing you again.