Now that I live in my father’s city, he is everywhere. I wander the streets of his old neighborhood, my steps tracing paths he and my mother forged decades ago. I work for the newspaper that he grew up reading — the one that published his wedding announcement and printed the crossword puzzles his mother loved. Our lives are a kind of Venn diagram that crosses time, and I delight in the overlap.

My New York apartment is four blocks away from the one that was once his. I walk by his old address on the morning when, spurred by a yearning for traditional masculinity, I decide to attempt a manual shave for the first time.

I don’t really think about the location until long after I’ve exited the drugstore with a multiblade razor and a bottle of shaving gel. By then, I’m home, and an uneasiness settles over me as I empty the contents of a plastic Duane Reade bag onto my counter.

I turn on the shower and close the bathroom door. I want the steam to soften my stubble and open my pores. It doesn’t have to be painful.

While I wait for the water to heat up, I stare at my reflection in the mirror; in a bathroom as small as mine, there’s really nowhere else to look. I search my face, as I so often do, for traces of my father as I re-enact a ritual he once performed at a sink just like this in an apartment nearby.

Our shared resemblance that day strikes me in a way that it rarely has. I run the fingers of one hand across my chin, tracing the sharp jaw that’s both mine and his. The other hand goes to the curly, untamed mess of hair on my head. Everyone tells me that came from him, too.