Some days, you think about other things while the Half Windsor basically loops itself into place. Muscle memory overcomes the moments when fatigue or numbness leave minimal energy for appearance. Wrap twice, pull through, and tug to tighten. That’s enough.
        No one really expects unwrinkled clothes on a writer, let alone a tie. They’ll forgive any slight imperfections.

        Other days you try. You really do. Lay the tie’s lengths against your chest. Adjust three times at least. Flutter your hands, popping each knuckle for maximum dexterity. Grip the edges gently. Let the fabric glide creaseless between your fingertips. Guide rather than chase. 
        Trying means stopping. Tearing your first attempts apart. Beginning again. Loop twice more carefully. Pinch the knot more firmly. Thread the short side through more gracefully. This one will come out straight. 
        Trying encourages this belief every time. And every time, you replicate the same flaw—the small flip cratering just under the right side of the knot, fabric crumpled like fenders collided. Yours will always be crooked. Always a touch awkward.
        Hope and disappointment arrive in these moments, equal in weight. 

        Still other days, you avoid the process altogether. Refuse to pull a tie from the closet and pretend to try. You promised your mom you’d dress professionally. At least look the part. But sometimes, darkness is lead in your limbs and your joints ache from its burden. A knot around the neck, even imaginary, is unbearable, digging at skin and breath. 
        Sometimes, like lighting a candle, you call him when it feels like too much. Talk about nothing. The words don’t matter beyond conjuring his voice, a magic trick summoning memories of him simply being there to help you tie a tie or build a fence or laugh at yourself. Just enough to turn the black in you to gray like the earliest moments of sunrise promise morning will return even when you believe it impossible.
        This is before he’s gone, before a stupid car question has you all the way to “Pops” in your contacts list and you remember no cellular plan will reach him now; remember those questions are search terms now, not the conversations you needed then. 

        Some days, tying that knot weaves past and present.
        Remember him standing behind you, familiar in ways foreign to him because his father disappeared before his first birthday. Feel his fingers gripping yours, four hands straining at a job for two, twisting your right wrist slightly so it’s harder to hold your tie the way he wants. Smell his aftershave, the one you can’t name anymore and will never wear because its saltwater and menthol scent roams your memories like his ghost. Watch him stare at your hands, prodding them through each step because he tends to take over the projects he’s trying to teach you how to do yourself. 
        You wonder, then and now, whether you’ll ever tie a knot he’d respect. You could never recreate any of the others he showed you. The slip. The trucker’s. The figure-eight. You remember him stepping back, leaving you to learn his lesson yourself with fumbling hands. But all you see are unruly, bulging tangles that won’t lie flat like his so effortlessly do, and you want to ask if that’s all he sees too.
        But you never asked and he never said, simply leaving you to repeat the process until you could do it yourself. After all, who was there to teach him?

        On the morning of the memorial, you snug the knot against your throat, a bright orange triangle bursting against your black-shirt backdrop. Slide your index finger along the sloppy fold you’ve grown to see as his—Randy’s half hitch.
        You show up at the cemetery. Like he would. For your mom, who leans against you most of the service. For your kids, who are suffering the empty space he used to fill. For your wife, who loved him from the day they met. For your siblings, who are trying to show up the same way you are. For all of them, you bear up, wishing his lungs had relaxed the way the fabric around your throat will when you tug it loose later. The loss of him tangles like the perfect knot he taught you, love and sorrow bound in equal parts.