purple.light

Friday, September 12, 2003

6 Degrees of Separation 

For the past 15 years, I have never thought much about my late father. He has largely been absent in my life and I don't really feel the loss. I have my mum, sis and a warm assortment of aunts and cousins for familial love, whether I have a father or not seems inconsequential. I have never had a problem talking about him, he was just someone distant. My memories of him are few and vague.

But today, for once, I felt distinctly uncomfortable talking about him. I didn't want to think about a father whom I never really knew. I just didn't want to talk about him and how long it has been since he passed on. But it just so happens that a colleague of mine is a fellow Hainanese. We were joking about our so-called "connection" when he asked for my father's name. Once he heard it, his face changed - it rang a bell.

Throughout the afternoon, he tried to find out more about his family's connection to mine and it turned out that his elder brother knew my father. He was even present at my father's wake, an event I remember vividly.

It was almost as if a shutter in my mind suddenly opened. The sense of loss that came over me was acute. I have been a fatherless child for 15 years, I have lost out on having a father for so long. I thought about how my mum has been struggling to bring up two young girls for 15 years, how hard it has been on her.

It made me realize all these have caused me to feel lonely always, even when I am among friends. I never really had a happy childhood - it's not easy to be happy when your mother is mostly absent in your life, when you cry almost everyday for two years because you feel fearful and alone.

This sense of loneliness and of not having someone who understands me plagues me everywhere I go. No matter what, it will always be with me, it would not leave me alone, ironically.

It seems as if I have been alone all these years. And that I always will.

yAnn at 9/12/2003 09:18:00 PM