By: Snaelle

My father is a beautiful ghost, a haunting mystery.

He died when I was two, but his few grains of time with us had slipped through the hourglass long before.

My mother discovered his absence was universal as well as personal through a chance encounter on a bus. “Did you hear…” transmuting her common journey into a pellucid metaphor.

He hadn’t run out on her – they’d been just a fling, a thing; the momentary only turned momentous by the slow explosion of my formation.

Fathers featured rarely in the pick and mix of friend’s families, so we formed a familiar familial group. We swapped personal stories like candies, or cards, in the schoolyard and “my father fell off a cliff” was my trump card.

Truth to tell, it was my only card. The one and only story I knew about my father, it was a magic incantation whose provenance was mystery itself. I could not remember having been told it, and did not dare to ask. There was no outward interdict, just a powerful silent spell I was unable to break.

At twelve years old, our holiday project – a family tree. Branches sprouted through my grandmother’s voice. A lopsided tree, one half lightning-struck, left out overnight. And in the morning, a bud – my father’s name, filled in (by whom, I’ve never known). My father’s name! Sacred mystery unveiled! And a resounding bump-slump-thump as my imagination grounded itself on the mundane shores of reality.

No longer formless, his name, Raymond, gave my father a shifting substance. He grew from atmosphere to shadow, from fairy-tale to puzzle. I searched for clues, and stumbled on a key by accident. In a stack of faded photos, something compelled me to suddenly ask: “Who is in this photo?”

“Don’t you know? It’s your father.”

Mouth-numb, heart-thrum, brain-undone. I am afraid to shatter the moment, myself. I keep it inside, glass-fragile.

I hunt through papers whilst my mother’s away, and discover a letter. On the reverse of a Bodhisattva picture is curlicued writing filled with optimistic mysticism, and ending with “I’d like to come and see you both I miss you beyond everything love and peace Ray”

No date to anchor my desire am I one of the both was I loved wanted what what what is this how do I what do I who am I now??

I am tumbling, suddenly.

I did not know how to find my feet, and stumbled, jumbled love inside of me. Love for a father I created in my own image; a reflection of every teenage hope and anxiety.

It took me adult-years to learn to speak – my first question about my father like falling from a cliff myself. My mother, catching me by surprise, answered each one lightly, easily, with as much-little as she knew. Baker, illustrator, believer in the world as belonging to all, snippets of the man she’d known.

I have wondered so many things about my father, shaped him in so many ways. From story, to shadow-figure, to comforting ideal. He was never any of those things – and he was all of those, and more.

I look at the photograph of my father, my forever young father.
I see a beautiful boy in the sun, hopeful, happy, seeking dreams. I see my father, I see part of me.