Epilogue

Dear you,

Since you are gone, it feels surreal. Faces from your past and present are suddenly all in the same place, smiling and crying and celebrating your life. We were hugging each other but still, I do never want to say goodbye to you, i haven’t really accepted yet that you’re gone. I never really will. Your presence is still felt everywhere. I can almost see your fingerprints glowing on everything you touched. Doorknobs and light switches, shoelaces and silverware. It’s like you’re still here, just out of reach, and your voice is still so clear, just distant, coming from another room.

Your life trace are seems uncanny, both unreal and hyper real, like a piece of fiction that’s somehow become a fact. interesting to be write and interesting to be read. i could read it once, twice, again and again. i read between the lines. There are stories hidden within that brief paragraph. There are chapters. Volumes. So much goes unsaid.

You left us with the puzzles: it’s a sudoku without any numbers, impossible to solve.

Your old phone number is still saved in my cellphones. i’ll never delete it.

Photographs of you take on more weight. A 5×7 inch glossy photo of your naturally smiling face weighs 3.5 ounces, but it may as well weigh a hundred pounds. Your joyful gaze transcends two dimensions.

Your shadow in my bed. Your emails and chat history on bbm become digital mementos. Every book you borrowed in library and every books that we shared to read, every memories is a gift from you, from old to new gravity. Exerting its own pull on the soul, a bittersweet black hole to be cherished from time to time, then placed back on the shelf. These objects can’t replace you, but their presence helps solidify your absence.

I couldn’t forget the memories of you even if I tried. Artifacts are everywhere, scattered through the mundane world of sights and sounds. Your sandwich at the table. The place where we used to have a breakfast together. Share our laugh and story. Your song on my ipod. At first the unexpected reminders sting, and i wish those things would respectfully disappear. But eventually the sting lessens, until it barely feels like they’re being stung, and i could sit in the same table, eat the sandwich as usual we had every morning, and hum along to your favorite song. Absolutely, alone and smile remind me of our good memories.

Life goes on without you. Time doesn’t pause. I still go to the class. Still walking to Kangar. Still going to library. Eating alone in the restaurant that you exactly know where is it. The sun rises and sets, rises and sets. Perhaps that’s the hardest thing of all to accept, that everything in the world just keeps on going without you in it. Nope, I mean, in my life.

Acceptance comes in slow stages over the months or maybe years following your farewell, and nevertheless sometimes upon waking from a dream about you, it’s hard to believe you’re gone. The dream gets dismissed as just a dream even though a part of the dreamer knows it was you, saying hello.

As I told you, you weren’t perfect. You were better than perfect. You were good. You were warmth and wit, kindness and integrity. I will always welcoming you with my arms after a long flight home. I know actually you loved this place, this planet. You loved it in a way that only you could, and your love lingers in everything you left behind. The books that you read and movies that we watched together. Music that we listened together. The place that we've visited. Your house, our house. Your container that used to be your rack, as long as we lived together. Your yellow umbrella which always you brought everywhere.

You loved. You are loved. You will be missed.

Yours,

-A