eight years left together

how do I know it’s eight years? I don’t. It’s a false average of many assumptions, thoughts, and hopes. My dad is seventy-three, my grandpa died at seventy-five or so. My dad is not the fittest, but not died-at-seventy-five-unfit. I am sure he can get to seventy-eight at least, I hope for eighty-two but that seems too rounded. Eighty-one is hopeful but realistic.

also my lil sister is ten, so it just seems fair she gets to eighteen with dad on her side. Not that it would suck less if it happened at nineteen, not that it would suck much more at seventeen.

i simply hope it’s eight, or plus obv. I reject six, seems too tomorrow. I can’t do ten, seems too hopeful.

i already miss my dad. I know it’s weird, I see him every couple of months. He is there, but he is not as there as he was five years ago. He is not even there as he was four months ago. My dad and I have always lived apart. He moved to Indonesia when I was eight and throughout my childhood I’d not see him for four months at a time. Every time I’d see him to, he’d be still the same. Then some years ago, it happened.

fuck, compared to the last time, he is definitely older.

deep inside I just pushed the thought away, like maybe he is tired or ran out of products for his skincare or something. But deeper inside, I knew. He started aging faster.

one of the theories is that aging is nothing but an accumulation of damage. Everything is fine until the pile of internal scars reaches a tipping point and there you go. More bad stuff happens to you in five years than in the previous thirty.

people close to us also age, but for real tho. I am writing this with a bit of surprise, which will come as surprising for you, or naive at worst. But here is the thing, I’ve always seen my dad in this limbo of being fifty. Like, forever. That limbo moved as a section across time but parallel to the real timeline, always staying where it currently does. Even at sixty, sixty-five, he would still be in his fifties as far as my mind hq would go. Then age acceleration kicked and I am like shit not only is he not fifty anymore, he is like a decade or so away from leaving the planet.

as I was saying, I miss my dad already. I often anticipate his death in the future, take my projected feelings of then in the present, and find myself heart-wrenched. Every time we say goodbye, not only it’s painful cause it’s painful, I now also get reminded that this might be one of the last forty-eight times we’re gonna say goodbye to each other.

forty-eight times is not many.

eight Christmas’, eight summers, maybe fifteen trips together, a hundred swims, a couple of hundreds of meals prepared by him, seventy times the same story about his dad not speaking english and saying “you die” in Italian to say “tomorrow”, ten times the same story about how someone took his identity, or forty more about his Pink Floyd concerts (he likes to talk about those more), forty-eight times him asking where I am going next, forty-eight times him saying that I am exactly like him (always traveling), ten times me imploring him to never send me again newspapers on whatsapp, fifty times him entering the room while I am on call and taking full time to leave (at times even waving at the person I am talking to), thirty-five movies watched together, sixteen times him forcing me to take blood exams cause I eat shit (and fourteen times me reminding him that’s definitely not the case anymore!), a thousand times him complaining that i stay too much on the computer, thirty times flexing to his friends I am an investor and that I move tons of money (I am not and I do not), a hundred time he reassuring himself I am gonna take care of my sister.

forty-eight times is not many.

yet, I am unable to take the best out of this. Every time I visit, the same paradox emerges. I know it’s one of the last forty-eight times, but my mind doesn’t recognize the urgency and the importance of it by default. It’s like studying for exams at university. You know you’re better off by studying a little every time, instead of cracking up sleepless nights the two weeks before. You know cause it already happened ten times, yet the cycle repeats, and at the end of it you exhaustedly lie again “next time, it will be different”.

i behave the same, although there will be a time when there will be no next time, there will be no extra chance.

i am unable to take the best out of it for the usual reasons, I seem to have always something urgent macro-project to do. Yet, when I am with friends, I seem totally fine with postponing the very urgent macro-project to do. Something is off, non-coherent, non-linear.

there are friends and parents. To a reasonable extent, there are people whose parents are friends. To the heart, parents are in some way more important than friends. So it would be normal to assume that you’d be much more prone to go the extra mile for them. And in some way, I do. If my dad was physically swapped with one of my best friends, I wouldn’t take two flights every two months to be in a place I quite much dislike. I am successful on that. I simply can’t push forward when I am with him.

the simple reality is that even if from a heart I’m losing one of my best friends, practically, we don’t have the same relationship I have with a normal best friend. I don’t have it because the moment I had difficulties, I decided not to go to him, certain he would have not properly understood. I didn’t go to him so many times that now for real he doesn’t properly understand. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Or the amount of context I ought to give is so big, that it’s so easy to default to shrug it off.

sometimes I feel that his light lights up only on certain topics. So surely it comes easier to take forward topics of freedom, happiness, psychedelics, music, and so on. But when it’s not about those, I feel I don’t have him. I don’t have him not in the way he doesn’t understand, I don’t have him in the way I see his intellect turns off, like static signal on an old tv. I comfort myself thinking that technically this happens too with other people, I don’t expect a friend to light up about interstellar travel the same way I do (although, weirdly enough, many friends of mine do). But then I catch myself, this doesn’t happen with my good friends. They might not light up, but they give their best to seem they are interested. And in fact, they might not be interested in the topic, but they are interested in giving me their presence. They’re kind and it’s their way of showing they care. My dad lacks emotional maturity, and he is not able to catch these, so it hurts and it pisses me off. So I often don’t tell him things.

the real truth is that I find myself not anymore going with the flow, but having and wanting to intentionally build a certain relationship with my dad, which is very normal with every person you meet. You don’t go with the flow with a person and randomly become best friends. The difference is that you can’t choose amongst different dad options, you have to work around with what you have and with what you had in the last twenty-seven years.

i am working on that.

it’s very hard to discern. Should I accept he is getting old and thus some behaviours are normal for old people or should I push and strive for his improvement? What comes as an act of love and what comes as an act of fear? What is it that I do, or don’t do, that comes from a place of pride and not wanting to explode in tears in front of him, and what is it that comes from a place of pure acceptance and radical appreciation? Where do my words and feedback actually help him, or where do they end up hurting him, by putting him naked in front of certain limitations he can’t escape from?

there are times when this is super easy. He came to visit last year and on the way from the airport to my place he completely freaked out. He couldn’t find the bus, he couldn’t find the train, he couldn’t find the metro, there were too many people around him, he didn’t know what to do, where to go, who to ask to help, and completely panicked. Heavily stressed, heavily overwhelmed, when I went to pick him up at the metro station it was like picking up a child after he went missing in a mall for a full day.

the fuck? He is the same person who did two world travels in the seventies and eighties, one east to west, one west to east. He is the same person who visited fifty countries by the time he was forty, in the pre-internet, pre-low cost, pre-everything. He is the same person who lived in the most dangerous neighborhoods in Mexico City, who got illegally detained by an undercover police squad, who tried all sorts of drugs, who opened a business in Indonesia at fifty-five. He is the same person who at seventy-three still sleeps in airports if there is a morning flight. Plus, he had a phone, Google Maps, speaks English, and all the usual gigs.

the curious case of Benjamin Button was not far off. My old dad is shape-shifting into a child too, yet only on the inside, regressing back, sinking in. It shows up in episodes or patterns, like extremely worrying like never before if I don’t call him for some days, or like the above. Panicking like a child left at the cashier by mom and slowly having to face the reality that he will not only have to pack the food by himself but also pay, but since he doesn’t have a wallet, somehow the world will crumble beneath him, but when the situation seemed only to get worse a bright light comes in, mom has taken the tomato sauce she had forgotten, and can safely lead back in charge.

saved and safe, at last.

my dad is running out of energy. The other day I asked him to pick up any location we could go to together this year and I’d take care of it. I was expecting, surely hoping, he would tell me something like Manali near Kashmir where he got closer to the Hare Krishna, or Mexico where he lived many years. Instead he wanted to visit a friend in Spain, or maybe Greece.

“you know Brando, I don’t feel like it anymore, I don’t have it anymore.”

it is a longer, longer time we had, than I had feared to hope. It is a far, far bigger love I feel, than I have ever shown.

eight years left together.