My father’s not yelling at me and he keeps asking me if I’m okay. I want to talk to him, but I don’t know how to do it or what to say.
What I wonder is this: how come you don’t notice the time going by, and you don’t think you are changing in any way, but then all of a sudden you realize that what you are thinking today is different from what you thought yesterday and that you are different from what you were yesterday—or last week—or last month?
I feel as if I’ve been asleep my whole life, and I wish I’d been asking questions like Sophie does, and I wish I knew more things. But even though I feel that, I don’t know how to turn into a person who asks questions, who knows more.
And my father—I have seen him just about every day of my life, and all of a sudden he looks like a complete stranger to me. I don’t know anything about him. I don’t know where he was born or what he does at work or how he got that scar on his forehead.
Everyone is talking about reaching Ireland, but I feel weird, as if we’re not really going to get there, or as if I’m not ready to be there. And what will happen with Sophie when we do reach Bompie? Maybe that’s part of the reason I don’t want to get there. I’m afraid for Sophie.
And I keep wondering how Sophie knows Bompie’s stories and if they really are Bompie’s stories, and if they are, did he only tell her ones about struggling in the water, and if he did, why did he do that?
And then I remember one of Bompie’s stories that was not about water. It was about his father dying. Last night I dreamed that Bompie was telling me that story, and when I woke up I went looking for my dad, and he was lying on a bunk, and I poked him until he woke up.
“Just checking,” I said.