The Accounted Orbit

I reach for you, Father.

You return anyway. The orbit pulls me back every time. The rational universe folding my hand back into itself like a snake that never truly escapes its own tail. You appear on the cracked concrete under the night-shift stars. You place the bat in my small hands and show me how to play a cover drive. You teach the high clear in badminton. The gentle nudge of the carom striker. You never burden me with the dream you could not live. You let me play my own way. You teach, then step back into the right distance. Neither spoiling, nor preaching. Just the clean line of a man who knows the ledger must balance. Never missing a beat when the shower invites a song.

All those years tighten the circle. You keep the post-retirement columns alive. Pages full of meticulous numbers, almost merciless in their exactness, tallied to the decimal places with receipts. Every habit you remind me of stays a suggestion. Never a command. You draw the quiet line with some friends. You draw some loud lines with your family. You confront, you enrage, you walk away and then return to simplicity. You love many things but confine yourself inside what you think you can afford. That easy chair in the hall or the corner of your bed. That is where I will see you. The street children see another man entirely. You indulge them, laugh with them, nudge their small worlds forward with cakes and candles.

Then the cancer arrives and the manifold of our lives tilts.

Your chubby face shrinks to bone. Your ear lobes bloat like forgotten entries. Your hairline recedes along the vector of the drugs. Your lips move, requesting for one more massage that might bring back some feeling into your arm. No drug enough to drown the pain. No more mornings and nights, just endless days for you. At night you call for your mother, many times. By day, you joke when you still can. You tell me I’ve done a wonderful job and later lament I force feed you medicines. You ask for a miracle and some more. You dream of walking demons. Yet, you keep the paperwork clean even as your body folds inward. You teach me, without ever telling so, how to carry pain with the grace you could find.

I hold everything inside when they tell me you have passed. Until the moment I place the fire on your chest. That last goodbye, which never was, fractures the orbit.

Two years later the hospice room still returns. Many disrupted moments return. Your laugh returns. Sirens, bright lights return. More importantly, you return. The strange ache remains. You are not here anymore, yet you have not really left. Didn’t you leave? Would you stay?

Sometimes, when I see a baby laugh, or watch a kid bat, you are there again suddenly. Laughing with their laugh. Swinging in their swing. The orbit tilts, by that single impossible degree.

The rational universe demands symmetry. Except where a son decides he is the accountant of his father’s departure.

I reach for you, Father.

You return anyway.