The day his father died, the air hung heavy, thick with a silence that was not peaceful, but rather a void where a heartbeat should have been. May 11th, a date that scored itself onto his soul, a brand of loss. He looked at his father's body, and it felt like gazing into a vacant house where a family once thrived – echoes of laughter, the scent of a life lived, now replaced with an unsettling emptiness, a completed puzzle with a gaping hole in its core.
Time, that indifferent sculptor, continued its work. Seasons bled into one another, each sunrise a mocking reminder of a world that kept spinning, uncaring of the chasm that had opened in his heart. He watched lovers carve their initials into trees, oblivious to the fact that even the tree would one day crumble to dust. He saw empires rise and fall, heard of wars fought over lines drawn on a map that shifted like sand. He witnessed acts of profound kindness and unspeakable cruelty, all swirling within the same cosmic soup. A child was born on the other side of the world, a star exploded light years away, a black hole devoured a galaxy, and none of it mattered, not really. Each event, grand or minute, felt like a rehearsal for the inevitable end.
He learned of entropy, the slow, steady decay of all things. He saw it in the crumbling of mountains, the fading of photographs, the fraying of his own memories. The universe, they said, was expanding, stretching itself thin, destined for a cold, silent demise – either a slow, drawn-out heat death or a violent collapse back into nothingness. Billions of years rolled by in the grand cosmic scheme, unnoticed, like grains of sand on an endless beach. What a ridiculous joke, a cosmic prank, he thought, to be given existence, only to comprehend its fragility, its ultimate futility.
And yet, through it all, a faint trace lingered – the ghost of a scent, his father's aftershave clinging to the fabric of spacetime. An echo of his laugh, a phantom touch on his shoulder in the dead of night. These remnants, these phantom limbs of memory, were both a comfort and a torment. A reminder of what he had lost, of the man who was now scattered across the cosmos, atoms dispersed into the void, never to be reassembled.
He was lost, adrift in the river of time, a vessel without a rudder, without a destination. His father was in an eternal sleep, a state beyond dreams, beyond consciousness, beyond existence itself. And he was left behind, haunted by the specter of a love that transcended even the death of the universe, a love that was now a burden, a beautiful, terrible ache that would never fade. The universe might end, but the void his father left behind, that black hole in his soul, would endure forever. A silent testament to a life that was, a love that is, and the agonizing eternity of what will never be again.
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| This letter is written and dedicated to my father, who I have lost in 2024. |
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