I feel like I keep losing people who help me navigate my life, Ayah.
I don’t know what to do.
I want you to scold me for getting a nose piercing, I want you to tell me to be a diplomat like my friends.
I want you to get worried about my work and my health.
I want you to thank me for taking care of the family.
I want you to see how hard I try, I want you to be glad that I can set my boundaries.
I want you to tell me that you’re proud of me like that night at the emergency ICU where you said “Gakpapa, sayang, sini, ayah gakpapa.”
I want to see you move on from the fatphobia that the military instilled in you, and turn it into worry if I love myself enough.
I want to see you go to therapy, one that awaits you before you had a stroke.
I want you to tell me how to deal with this alone, put me in the corner of the living room, where I can eavesdrop on the thing you actually want to tell me, but you’re telling it to the guests who asked for your advice instead.
It must be fate that the last full sentence you told was how beautiful I was that day, when my whole life you’re the one who makes it impossible to believe it.
But I forgive you.
More than anything, though, I want you to be free from your pain & suffering.
I want you to be glad that the family is in good hands, the hands of the two powerful women in your life. One that you shaped to grow armor and breathe fire.
Sometimes I feel like life is no longer for me, Ayah.
Like everything is just suffering after you. But I know it’s not true.
I know this is my chance to be like you, to grow gentle and loving.
The way you cultivate life from your calloused hands.
I should get checked for PMDD, but this pain is beyond hormones and full moon.
It’s losing you at the end of the world.
It’s losing everything at the end of the world.
It’s being alone at the end of the world.
It’s the attempt to find happiness at the end of the world.
And you were my first world to shatter.
I am utterly empty, Ayah.
I have nothing for anyone except this grief that piles up higher and higher.
The higher it gets, the closer I am to reach you.
Right now it feels like I can just crawl into where you are, to sleep by your bedside like in the hospital.
Right under God’s nose.
