On a Sunday evening..

On a Sunday evening, I had to open an old book, full of pictures.

It had been somewhere in untouchable part of my private library, full of dust. And that evening, I decided to open it.

It has pictures of grief, pain, and bitterness, that I never let myself to cry them out loud, or even to admit that they exist. Those pictures have a main theme. It was about a cold stiff body of a man lying in the middle of our living room.

Many people were coming, with tears, with poignant songs that caused my self to burst out into tears. I didn’t know why, I didn’t understand why. He was there, and everyone around me was crying. It was like a movie you watched on TV; you saw it happened but you did not take part of it.

I touched his hands. They were cold and frozen, and did not respond to me. I touched his face, but he kept closing his eyes. It was not real, I thought. It was a dream, I believed. They closed his coffin and they put him deep inside the ground. So that’s it. Inside the ground, so keep it like that. Nothing is real.

Then that’s how it stopped. It stayed like that for 16 years, until I realized how I have lived without accepting that he was gone. He’s gone. I can not touch him anymore. I can not reach him anymore. Not even a phone call?

I was shaken, by the truth, and the truth is he is not there anymore. When I need someone to be there in many things; my becoming 17, my music, my graduation, my scholarship.

I could not. I could not say goodbye. I am longing for him, and still want him around me.

But he can’t. The truth is he can’t. And it’s not his fault. Nobody’s fault. Not even God’s fault.

I just need to wake up from dreams. Dreams that I would see him somewhere here sometime. And to start to step into reality that the time now I live in is without his presence. Without his presence....

Groningen
Tuesday, 16 September 2003, 11:05
*Also written for Mutiara and Ondo