A Figure on the Edges of Remembrance

‘Your dad has passed away,’ Mum said. The words passed through me like a wisp of smoke in the wind. There were no tears, just a strange stillness, as though the world had inhaled but forgotten to breathe out.

He had always existed at the edges of remembrance, like the afterimage when you close your eyes against the sun, warmth still clinging to your skin. Memories. Those moments, warm yet fleeting. The sharp tang of overpriced alcohol at football matches, his laugh when I repeated unsavoury chants. Sitting on his shoulders, gripping what little hair he had left, the roar of the crowd rumbling round us. Silly songs on the journey home. Promises that we would see more together. We never did.

Time unravelled, days stretched thin, memories frayed. I buried myself in the dull monotony of university life, retreating into libraries and cafés as if they could shield me. The smell of freshly brewed coffee, the soft clink of spoons against ceramic, the murmurs drifting between friends, books stacked carelessly on tables. In that rounded sanctuary I dulled the edges of grief, yet lost the courage to confront it.

Grief waits patiently in emptiness, then rushes in relentlessly like an express train, shattering the solitude. It evolves, bitter and sharp, like broken glass catching the light. It whispers in the silence between pages, seeps into the way I care for friends, nurturing them, fathering them even, filling a role I never had for myself. Was it selfish? I don’t know.

He never returned, but his shadow endured, like viewing art by candlelight, each memory dimly flickering, unclear. I tried casting pain away with shadows, unaware darkness cannot dispel darkness. I fled further inside myself, but salvation was not forthcoming.

Why did it take so long to discover the truth? Bitterness resurfaces. Memories flutter like a butterfly stretching its wings, delicate and transient. Fragments, constructed through a barely remembered fever dream. His thick Brummie accent patiently explaining chess; straining to stay awake for Match of the Day, then being carried to bed; the comforting rhythm of his footsteps — thump, thump, thump — on the rickety stairs, scattering my consciousness.

Years stolen by silence, experiences never forged. What remains in this emptiness? Grief, perhaps? It’s like a strange sadness without the tears. Regret too. Yet within café bubbles, amid endless rows of library shelves, I found a kind of tether. The smell of coffee, the creaking stairs from childhood, echoes of his voice guiding me slowly across a chessboard. Candlelit threads of memories.

These fragments of memories for so long felt like disturbances in a haunted house, faint noises heard from afar. Connections barely recognised, emotions hidden behind doors gently shut. But candlelight flickers over them, casting memories in uncertain refractions. They offer no clear path ahead, no grand revelation, just fragments from which meaning might, one day, be gathered.