The unique way this collection is written is that the meaning and the story changes based on perspective. The overarching theme is the story about love, loss, reconciliation between a father and son. The interpretation of the story changes based on whether you read it as the Son being the narrator or the Father.
The weight doesn’t leave overnight. It lingers in corners of hotel rooms, in the spaces between phone calls, in the way shadows stretch across empty beds. The city hums outside, indifferent to revelations that shake foundations.
There’s something you should know.
The voice had crackled through the speaker, finally ready to speak truths we’d guarded like wounds. Her photograph sits on the nightstand. She’s frozen in time, eternally young, smiling, unaware. Did she know what was coming? Did any of us?
I start to see Him differently now. Not as the villain in my story, but as someone carrying his own burden. Someone who lost what I lost, differently but just as deeply.
A memory breaks the surface – the day I fell in love. How it felt like flying. How it felt to be whole. How it felt like finally understanding something I had read in his eyes all these years.
Love changes you. He had said.
He was pensive. He was thinking of the last time he saw her. Till date I don’t know if he was trying to explain or trying to warn me.
The truth about her comes in pieces, like a puzzle assembled in dark. She was perfect in death, or flawed in life. She was taken, or she left. She was a saint or a human being. Depending on who’s remembering or who’s forgetting.
She would have been proud. I said.
Thank you.
He said as the emotion broke through his stoic face.
For carrying the weight I couldn’t see. For protecting me from truths I wasn’t ready for. For loving me through the anger, through the blame, through the years when I couldn’t tell the difference between love and abandonment.
The city lights paint patterns on the ceiling, and in their gentle glow, I finally understand: we were both just trying to survive her absence.
Whether that absence came in one cruel moment or in a thousand small departures, it shaped us both.
Continue Reading – I’m Sorry
Ace’s Blog 
Leave a comment