Special. Favourite. Only. Boy.

I.

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I was four years old. My Dad wouldn’t always take me in to school, but when he did, he would always drop me off the same way. He’d park as close as he possibly could to the entrance— he always had a knack for finding ‘salesman’s parking’ as he’d call it throughout the years— and he’d walk me into my preschool classroom, holding my hand along the way. He’d talk to the teacher, I’d see my friends and wave. Then, he’d say goodbye. We had this little handshake which, honestly, I’d like to keep for myself and my brother.  All you have to know is that it was very special, and very fun, and so, so important, okay? So once we performed this super cool handshake, he’d leave for work, and I’d go eat a Pritt stick or do some other four year old activity.

But one day, Dad must’ve been late for work. Or maybe he thought I was ready. He dropped me off— salesman’s parking as always— and he walked me to the gate, but not past it. He said goodbye, and left me, out in the heat of the early Jo’burg morning. I made it about halfway down the steps before I burst into tears. And I cried, and I cried, and I cried. 

My teacher must’ve come out at some point, thinking someone was murdered, and I probably told her about how I missed my Dad, about how scared I was that he’d left me on my own, and that we didn’t do our super cool handshake that we’d spent our entire lives perfecting. I probably sounded like I’d lost something, like something was forgotten that only I remembered for sure. It must have been so lonely. My teacher called my Dad, and he came back, devastated, and absolutely late for work. He walked me into the classroom, we performed our amazing handshake, and I knew that as long as I had my Dad with me, everything would be alright.

 

I was 18 years old. I had just graduated from high-school and I felt like I was an Adult at last. My Mom, my Dad, and myself were holidaying at a Greek island called Kephalonia. We were on one of those boat cruises that you find on a Google search of the area, that let you hop from island to island. The weather was perfect, one of those scorching hot days with only an inkling of a breeze. We’d stopped pretty far out from the island we were visiting; if I had to estimate now I’d say about 100 meters away. The staff gave everyone two options: you could either get in the dinghy and drive with the captain, or you could swim the 100 odd meters to the shore. My Dad and I both elected to swim. My Mom, meanwhile, took the dinghy.

It is important to note here that I am a terrible swimmer. 

I got about 20 meters away from the shore before my left calf started cramping up. I’d drifted a little further behind the rest of the swimmers (on account of being a terrible swimmer.) and my Dad looked back to see where I was. And in that moment, I felt like that four year old, stuck on the stairs, crying for his Dad. And I cried, and I cried, and I cried his name, as much as the waves would allow. It was like he moved the tide and the current itself to get to me. We floated in each other’s arms for about a minute before the dinghy came back round to pick me up. But as long as my Dad was there, holding me like I would slip through his arms into the deep water below him, I knew that everything would be alright.

 

I was twenty years old. My Mom had left me alone at the house for about thirty minutes at this point, but honestly who was keeping count. We’d gotten a phone call from the hospital up in London that my Dad had suffered a cardiac arrest, and we had to get to the hospital as soon as possible. We asked our neighbours if they could take us up. Despite it being Sunday evening at 5:30, the husband hadn’t had a drink, so he said he’d drive. We’d walked over to their house, and my Mom remembered that she’d forgotten her glasses in the hallway. I ran back to get them, trying to mentally prepare myself for the trip ahead. 

But then I realised something. It was April 2021. The middle of the COVID pandemic and the third lockdown. The hospital would only allow one guest to visit my father (at this point, I was hoping for the best, and that regular rules applied to our case). Either I go up to the hospital, get denied admission, and wait in the car. Or I stay.

I had one thought. To this day, I still do not know whether it was the right one. I wouldn’t want Dad to wake up and see that I was worried. I wasn’t going anywhere.

So, I wait at home. My brother calls me. I see my Dad’s face on the walls, on countertops, on my phone. I watch football. I write in my journal something I’ve read a few times since whenever I feel lonely. The quiet is muggy, and it makes me sweat. Then, my phone starts vibrating. I pick up the phone, thinking it might be news from the hospital, but it’s only my friend. I answer the call, and hear his excited voice through the receiver, asking me where the hell had I been that day? 

And I cried, and I cried, and I cried. 

Alone on that couch we no longer have, in that house that we no longer live in, all alone, to a confused but empathetic voice on the receiver. And this time, my Dad doesn’t save me. I’m just a lost, scared kid, who keeps telling himself the same thing over and over. It’s that same lie I’ve been telling myself since 5:30, that same lie that loses its power every hour without hearing news from London. The same lie our neighbour, and dear friend, tells me outside the door of their house, before her, her husband, and my Mom get in the car. Everything is going to be alright.

 

I am twenty-one years old. Every text message feels like a heart attack. I write from a house my Dad will never see, wearing clothes I didn’t own before that day. I struggle to sleep, but I’m getting better. I still cry, although I’m managing it better I think. There’s not a day that goes by where we don’t think about what we’ve lost. But we’re growing stronger every day, though, my family. We’ve gone through birthdays, Christmas, New Year without him. 

And now, as winter turns to spring, we approach a year without my Dad. I have essays and exams. After that, I will officially graduate from Durham University. And I have no idea what comes next. The people around me talk as if they know what I want, what might clear my head and help me find myself. I know what I want, but of course I will never get it. That void is never going to be filled. And because of that, I don’t know if anything will ever be alright ever again.

But I guess there’s only one way to find out.

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II.

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One night, while working on the second draft of my first novel, I came across a document called Time Passes (working). I had no recollection of ever writing something called that, and it wasn’t like I was making any progress with the novel, so I opened it and read through the piece above. I made a few edits here and there to help the flow and fix the grammar, but otherwise tried not to impose too much of my new self onto it. I felt like an archaeologist, picking the dirt off a small stone carving that I could hold in my palm. I am a better writer now, and I could change some things up to improve on the piece. But what would be the point of that? What would be the point in writing over my own history, erasing the person I once was?

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At the start of my final year of university, about seven months after my father passed away, my roommate and I went to a second hand book sale. One of Durham’s college libraries was trying to clear out old stock, and were selling books at £2-£3 a pop, which in today’s publishing market is an absolute steal. I bought three books that day: a dense post-humanist theory book for my dissertation, Nova Swing by M. John Harrison, again, for my dissertation, and a first edition hardback copy of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men. I pointed this out to my roommate and we laughed. We had watched the Coen Brothers movie adaptation just the previous night! What a coincidence! I bought it as more of an intellectual exercise, just to see if there was any differences in the movie compared to the novel, though I was pretty sceptical about whether it would engage me in anyway now that I knew the story.

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McCarthy’s writing takes a bit of getting used to. He cares little about his character’s streams of consciousness, instead finding meaning and personality through meticulous descriptions of their actions and dialogue. Many of his sentences are long, difficult to take in at the first time of reading, and contain the word ‘and’ about three to eight times before you’re given the small mercy of a full stop. He also employs highly technical jargon, using hyper-specific vocabulary to describe geographical features and the surrounding ecology (my brother still complains about his experience reading Blood Meridian. “What the hell is chaos grass?”). Desolate landscapes and harsh weather conditions reflect the inner turmoils and conflicts going on in his characters’ souls. For McCarthy, the exterior is the interior, and it's up to the reader to participate and fill in the gaps.

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But it is also some of the most effective and efficient prose you can possibly read, and it is a joyous experience. That’s what I found when reading through that old hardback of No Country For Old Men, just before bed, with a mug of roiboos and a square of chilli dark chocolate on my bedside table. It’s hard to describe, and I’m sure nobody will believe me, but midway through the scene where Anton Chigurh threatens an old shopkeeper with “How much you ever saw lost on a coin toss”*, something slid into place inside of me. It was just the sort of moment where you notice something stirring inside of you, and you have the presence of mind to capture it in your memory just by saying to yourself, “Oh, I see now.” Even though I’d been studying English Literature for three years, writing all my life, loving stories and literature since I could remember, it felt like that was the first time I truly realised the purpose of the art of storytelling. It wasn’t flowery language or complex philosophies, all that had to come secondary to the feeling I had right then. Art wasn’t an intellectual exercise for me anymore. It was intuitive. Spiritual, even.

Maybe the experiences listed in Time Passes (working) led me to this realisation. My highly privileged upbringing, in some ways, may have stunted my ability to experience life in the way that many people do. Death was always something that happened to other people. That was the case until it visited our door at 1:30am. Now, it’s happening to you, it's happening all around you. And in some perverse way, you realise you’re alive, and breathing, and now you have to figure out what to do with that realisation.

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I don’t mean this to say that I believe these events happened for the express purpose of my own development, like it was preordained by God that my father should die for my personal growth. I’ve always hated that idea. Things happen, and then we figure out what to do with the weight of it all. That’s just survival. But out of that survival, maybe we can form something akin to a greater understanding. I struggle with this idea even now, that something good can come from something objectively bad, and at the cost of someone I love. But that’s the weight I have to work to understand.

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I must have been grappling with this as I was writing Time Passes (working). The grief I described is unflinching, visceral. I’m jealous that I used to be able to write something as effective as ‘every text message is a heart attack’. I would later feel this twinge of pain when my mother randomly called me at gym. I felt that heart-dropping half second before telling myself not to worry. However, my mother was calling to say my grandmother had an accident, one which would later lead to her death. My anxiety, against which my only defence was to call it irrational, was right. And I wish I had an answer to this idea that ‘the void will never be filled’, but I don’t. Will everything be alright? Well, betweem the climate crisis and the potential rise of fascism in Europe and America, it really depends on what you mean by ‘everything’.

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And yet, that last line echoes in the silence left after it. From all the pain that came before it, there really is no reason to look forward to the future, no evidence to be so adamant that there is something worth ‘finding out’. So why, at the climax of my grief in the piece, did I feel this hope? Is it hope at all, or is it something else? Is it sarcastic? Is it a joke I'm making at my own expense?

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I don’t think so. I think there was a part of me that wanted to admit something that, at the time, I would have seen as trite and insensitive. The only option is to live, that is obvious. But a part of me knew that I had changed for the better since, and because of, my father’s death. I was reading better, I was writing better, I saw the world just a little bit more clearly than I did before. I wouldn’t have had my moment while reading McCarthy, I wouldn’t have done as well in my final year of university without the mindset that his death bred in me. I went looking, and found something worthwhile after all.

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And I still don’t know what to do with that. I can’t admonish myself for it. But when everything I achieve lurks in that shadow, can I really celebrate it as something that I have accomplished? This little stone carving that I hold in my palm now wouldn’t exist without that weight, and I think that the carving is beautiful. Isn't that so cruel of me? Will I ever know how to navigate all this?

I guess there’s only one way to find out.

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*This isn't a Mandela Effect or a typo. In the movie, this line is changed to "How much you ever lost on a coin toss?", taking out "saw", I'd assume, to make the threat more personal to the shopkeeper. Personally, I prefer the movie's take on this line.