53, do you remember me?

It’s all falling apart. This house of cards you built, this land you find yourself in. Always finding yourself, suddenly, without passion, exhausted at the sight, and no sweat to show for it. Cracks in the foundation, you got it all wrong and it’s crumbling.

You thought you were at the end, that the road paved before you, and as you go down this decline knowing it will be gentle at first only to accelerate, was ready to handle the momentum of everything you wrought. Instead, a patchwork of cracked lightning erupts alongside you, beneath you, and up ahead, chasm upon chasm, deep and wide and irreparable.

you have failed, there is no cruise control for you here.

And you scramble in your seat, desperate to get off this ride, hands against the tarmac, fingertips bleeding for purchase, and it mocks you, it laughs in your face. There is no stopping it now, it yells above the din of debris you are plowing through, this is the machine you built: you are it and this is the damage you’re leaving in your wake.

If only this was a dream and I could feeling nothing

I tell her, I’ve been waiting for the other show to drop
I tell her, I’ve been far too lucky
I tell her, I do not trust this

And I don’t think it’s all that absurd to be afraid. My dreams are rife with despair and resignation, desolation and acceptance, a certain kind of grief that always was, always will be, always expected.

I tell her, this is not sustainable
I tell her, we need to hold it together

And maybe this is the tension, this is the yawning sound, the tinny vibration of something stretching to its limits, that whatever is holding it together is being tugged by a momentum that demands it is thrown apart.

I tell her, we are so close

And perhaps this is the wrong analogy: there are so many moving parts that I imagine it to be a centrifuge when it might be better understood as a house of cards, that this issue is gravity.

But he remains silent

I look for him over my shoulder and he’s there, always there
He looks down at me slowly, quietly says, it will come. it will all end
He raises his head and looks off to the horizon
But not now, he says, not now

Ba,

There is so much I have come to appreciate about you over the years, there is so much I am embarrassed of.

How do you did do it? How did you not just put me in my place when I was so sure, so arrogant, so clearly stupid? How did you keep a straight face when I thought I knew anything about anything. I remember, I remember trying to tell how life was, what I knew about it. I wish I could laugh about it now, but instead I cringe. Instead, I try now to be more humble. I look at my kids and sometimes, not as often as when I was there age, I see it. I see the same pompousness and I wonder: is this what you saw? And like you then, I do not mock them, do not put them in their place. I think to myself, oh man, I hope they get it later on. I listen, I give advice, I let them breathe, I let them get there on their own without them crashing into the rails.

So thank you Ba, thank you for putting up with my stupidity and my confusion. Thank you for putting up with my laziness and my worries. Thank you for tugging me gently from the edge and for pushing me towards the road. The older I get, the more I’ve come to appreciate you and the stronger your voice in my head becomes.

Keep talking to me Ba, even when I don’t show it, I am still listening.

I tell the little one, who is little no longer, “there is the ‘quiet’ and there is the ‘roar’, and in between is the living”

I gesture with my hands, I struggle with the words, because it’s just coming to me, this is what I’ve been feeling for so long, in that moment of telling her, the longing for the quiet, the staving off of the roar and the fourth thing, the thing I cannot bear, the thing I cannot face, but I do not tell her that, I do not dare: the end of all things, the inevitable, the inescapable, what underpins the preciousness of time, the forward momentum of each echo.

You want to write your way out of this and it’s impossible, you don’t have words for it, you don’t know how, you’re ill equipped. Let’s set aside that perhaps you are the cause of it. that it is all your fault because of everything you prided yourself on. You called it hubris. Indeed. You missed the signals, the warnings, ‘she doesn’t engage with the other children, she plays by herself’ and you wrote it off as her being shy, she’s just shy, we have history of that. You who was sat on the floor in kindergarten because you couldn’t shut up in class. You who always yearned to connect because you had no brothers, no sisters, no father. You didn’t have history of that, if anything it’s another addiction that you’ve tried to shed, another bad habit you try to avoid.

And you hear her weep and you wonder what pain you ignored in her short life, you think of that song, “the dreaming tree” and at some point, you won’t be able to protect her, at some point you will be in the ground with the dirt and the maggots and the worms. Or dust, or ash. Either way, you will be dead and will she suffer? You hound yourself, will she suffer? If there ever a time to believe in God and the afterlife, it is now and I cannot bring myself to it.

Between the quiet and the roar, there is the living and the absolutely certainty of the end