When you’re a parent and you retreat into yourself because you have to, when the sheer force of your child’s existence slams you into walls. When you remember that your own father died when you were still a child. When you remember that you’ve been without him for more than 30 years. You wake up, you breathe, because you have to. You have to for your child. You have to for your father, who can’t, whose breath stopped decades ago. Why did he teach you to sail if he expected you to follow him, to be run aground in the land of Shades. Why did he make you practice your knots if he accepted a future in which you might let yourself drift away.

You’re a parent and your daughter’s kindness towards others makes you cry. You’re aware of the treacle, the cliché, the boring predictability of being wrecked by your own child’s noble and virtuous and gentle character, and yet, you can’t stop yourself, can’t make a more “interesting” choice.

What is more interesting than being wrecked by your own child’s innate kindness and generosity of spirit.

What is more interesting than grieving your father who has been dead for 31 years, still feeling in your guts and behind your eyeballs the anguish of a child that wakes up and finds itself alone in a dark, dense forest with no clear path in any direction.

What is more important than the will to live, the desire to be done with it all, and the tension in a strained link between the Past and the Future. Being and Nothingness. What matters more than Survival? What matters more than never ever leaving your child to fend for herself without you.

Never leave her to wonder where you’ve gone and if you can still hear her voice. Never if you can help it. He couldn’t help it.

Tell yourself- as improbable, impossible, foolish as it is-

For her, I will defy fate as it’s written. I will defy Death itself. I will conquer Death itself. For her.