I kept walking.
Funny how walks can loosen the knots in your mind that have been there for a while.
Walking on the terrace had become more than an exercise.
A confession booth, maybe.. or a therapy loop, I don’t know.
But it’s a replay screen… for the conversations I wish had gone differently.
Especially with him.
I don’t know when exactly the anger stopped making sense.
When the sharpness in my memories began to round off.. into questions instead of accusations.
I had asked him once on the verandah,
“Did time go so fast?”
And he said,
“Son, it went faster than the blink of an eye.”
That line, It came back to me tonight.
Louder than usual, like it wanted something from me.
I stopped near the water tank.
The breeze tugged at my T-shirt, like someone trying to get my attention.
“You always said you didn’t need much,” I stood there and spoke silently.
“And yet, we needed so much from you, both stability and answers.”
He never had those.
I remember the look in my mother’s eyes… vocal but filled with broken trust.
I remember my brother turning colder every time things broke down.
And me… trying to be the one who asked the hard questions.
Even though all I got in return was silence.
But somehow, through it all, He always showed up.
I think that’s what hurt the most, he did love us. Just not in the way we needed him to. And by the time we realized it, we had already lost too much time.
I sat down on the low parapet wall, one leg dangling over.
Looking out at a city that didn’t care what ghosts you carried.
There were both dead and living ghosts.
Like the way I used to ask my mom about religion and why we followed it?
And how her eyes would harden, and she’d say, “Let’s not talk about this now.”
Or my grandmother, who didn’t just shut me down, she hit me for asking.
“What do you even think of yourself?”
she would yell, between blows with the same soft, caring hands that fed me with love.
It wasn’t about God. It was about the fear of losing ground.
They weren’t defending beliefs, they were defending identity.
The only version of truth they would ever been allowed to grow up with.
The wind shifted again.
I looked up.
“Why do I still talk to you like you’re here?” I asked.
“Maybe because memory is funny like that. You don’t choose when it speaks. You just learn to listen… and give your answers.”
“You know I’m trying to do better now, right?” I whispered.
“I fight less, I pause more and I ask myself what value I’m hiding before I blow up.”
Silence in the air but it felt warm.
The last time I fought with my fiancée, it wasn’t about the thing we were yelling about, it never is.
We were both arguing about trust.. but from different wounds.
Her wound said: Prove I’m safe with you.
Mine said: Don’t let anyone make you feel small again.
I stood up, brushing the dust off the back of my jeans.
“Maybe you passed down more than your silences,” I said to the sky.
“I think… I got your habit of silently loving the people near you.
But I also got your fear of not being enough.”
I started walking again.
The wind was quieter now or maybe I was.
And when I hear his voice, “Time went faster than the blink of an eye” ..
I try to slow myself down, just enough to listen.
The only thing left for me to do as a son is to listen.
Whether the words come from my mind,
or from the wind,
or from the raindrops that fall from the heavens.
A part of my life written down inspired from the write ups of other lives from Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler, PhD’s book, Optimal Outcomes. check my daily insights from it out here : https://ajayan.substack.com/p/the-invisible-map-between-us