An Understanding

Father wasn’t around much when I was growing up. I grew wary of euphemizing his temporary visits, the birthdays he missed, and all the empty spaces and silences he left behind. His shadow was closer to me than he ever was. Its claws clutched me firmly yet subtly, careful to never announce its grip but eagerly inclined to never let go. His haunting absence held me close and warm; it filled in for his arms whose touch I had forgotten long ago. It seems natural and like the air around me, I almost seemed to breathe and bask in it.

For the longest time, the only picture I could recall of my childhood was of a child, trembling and cloaked in fear and a father, covered with the stench of bottled liquor which he willingly chose over his only daughter. Daddy and liquor were bonded by secret matrimony. He tried to break free from it all his life but never could. And when he finally did, there was nothing much left of him except ill-health, wasted youth, the fear of being erased from the face of earth without making amends and the awareness that he is slipping away from all that he had held dear but had taken for granted.

It is only with the passing of years that I began to understand his love. The love a lonely, sorrowful man had for his daughter, so much of whose life he had missed out on, and to whom his shadow is more familiar than the man himself. It was a love filled with longing and regret. A sad and silent kind where you wish to turn back time and do all the things you could have done but didn’t. But the world ain’t no wish granting factory and you're running out of time. So you just love from a distance, lock your love up in your heart and sleep at night wondering about all the could and should have beens. This was how my father loved me. And i guess this is how i love him too- from too far a distance, from this side of the universe, carrying him in my heart and keeping him alive like this.