The black hole

When my father passed away when I was sixteen, I fell into a huge black hole.

By then, we had already spent half my life apart, and the parent-child relationship had diluted to an unfeeling, material one. Whenever I met him, it was always about money, a collection of extra allowance for me. Apart from that, there were also occasional gifts, things I would not receive from my mum. Most kids at our schools were well-to-do and well-endowed with many expensive items, a clear evidence against our apparent meritocratic education system. We were living on the line. That was why I always got excited whenever it was time to meet him.

Our meet-ups were scarce, a handful of times in a year or two. It usually took place over a lunch, at a Chinese or Western restaurant, because that was just about what he would eat. Conversations were superficial, though I can no longer recall what we used to talk about. It was more like a quick meal, followed by a pick up of cash. The air was always cold, and he probably felt it more than I did.

The evening when the news came to me one evening, I was overcomed with shock. He was in the hospital for a while, but had chosen not to inform us. I was angry to have been kept out of the loop. It was later on that I found out the reason. You might be able to guess it. I am too ashamed to confess it.

The period that followed was an awful black hole. I did not have to make an effort to carve it out of my memory, it was just an absence of any, a complete gap. When I tried to return to school that following week, I found out that the teacher had announced the news to the whole class. I detected an unusual level of concern in people, a sort of sympathy that made things worse. I tried to hide at home, but the lack of engagement sent me straight into an engulfing state of hollowness. Time crawled by as I spent many afternoons staring at the ceiling in a daze. It was a mental paralysis, an emotional blackout. I tried to sleep the day away, but the floodgates wouldn't close and the dams were broken. I tried to deny, to forget, to externalise, to rationalise, but each comfort was momentary. It didn't help that it was a taboo to talk about anything related to the event. I had just lost something important but I couldn't tell or show anyone. It was a silent, lonely grief. I went to school and did my exams with my mind and body, and locked everything else in a safe.

This was the inaugural black hole, the beginning of many black holes in my life over the next eight years, many of them with no identifiable cause. But even if there were a cause, there is a no cure for loss, no lost corner in Norfolk that we can retrieve what we had left behind, or what had left us.