A week before I returned to Singapore from Australia, Mum had to put the pug down.
Absence
The thing that haunts me, is how normal my father’s absence feels. Has felt from the beginning.
On bright stars in dark nights.
2013 was year where my desire to go walkabout with possessions in a bundle at the end of a stick – or a couple of bags in my case – came true. I’ve been on it for a year and a week today, but rather than some far flung locale, I’m writing this post from my childhood home. Home is something that seems to punctuate journeys though, so perhaps there is no better place.
Numbering loss
My entire understanding of my father’s death at this point, rides on numbers. September 4 – the stage of cancer he was diagnosed with.
What I miss
Enormous highways to forever. The feel of a powerful vehicle responding to my touch. A dry salt wind from deserts truncated by the ocean. Walking, where it is life and love and the very breath of these things, unstoppable for the sheer force of forward impulse. Not dulled by the hobbles of practical function. Unclouded vision for a perfect shard of light filtering through the dead monoliths of a concrete jungle, to illuminate a single flower on a stem. Solitude. Waking to the impossible fire of life, as more than a schizophrenic deception. The memory of a world not this strange gilded hamster-cage of a country, where there is only duty and unspoken rituals impossible to decipher. The silent reproach for the fallen, summoned from depths of hollow …
The sound of heartbreak
But how do you get away from the memories? That’s what she’s left with. The missing words to a prayer she can’t recite. Trying to find all that’s lost. – Mark V. Krajnak, from JerseyStyle Photography’s Friday Noir The day before I turned 33, I delivered a eulogy for my father, as his body awaited the cremating furnace.