Even though this week has been furiously disjointed, from a sudden directional change preceding coincidental emails which lead to being mutual tourguides to two boys from Germany where we exchanged culturally dense stories in 2 separate days spent going to Batu Caves a waterfall and the beach… well, nothing disoriented me as much as a few minutes in yesterday morning’s KL traffic. The driver of the car next to me had bent his head forward with a halfway smile in my direction.

He was my father.

I think time stopped. I hadn’t seen the man in over a month, maybe more. It even took me awhile to figure out that it was him. How was it that sending my sister to work would lead me into the morning rush, hundreds of cars in the city, and it would be just so that the one next to mine for a few seconds belonged to him? Maddeningly still, all he did was smile at me. He didn’t attempt to say anything, even though both our windows were down. He didn’t call, or text afterwards. He just looked at me and drove on.

An hour later, while having breakfast, my head was still in the traffic like a replay on loop. I was trying to pinpoint my exact feelings and I believe that above everything else… I felt old. I felt really old. Up to a few years ago, a great deal of my life was measured alongside his in realtime. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t in the same house. Hell, maybe that helped. He had the magnifying glass, he had the tracking device, he had the megaphone.

I wonder now, months and years later, where he has kept them.
Ever since I have moved into my apartment, one of my dreams came true. Less contact. In our case, this means our relationship has greatly improved, and even more so after I showed him how to write text messages on his phone. My father and I are volatile incompatible substances and minimizing contact means we orbit gently in our own containers, silent, happy, whole.

That was why I froze like a deer in the headlights. We were still separate as we were months ago but that space between our open car container windows felt like a leak. What would happen next? A mini timewarp? A flood of calls like before? Every half an hour, looking for an explanation, looking for time, keeping my size small, his genes in check but not his temper? But he didn’t even honk. Not a word. It was amazing that I even noticed he was there. Then his window censored his face again and he drove on. We took separate lanes, I saw the back of his head & large white car disappear in traffic. In my small broken car I held my breath until he was gone, momentarily angry at how ready I was to switch back to my younger scared self, and then I never felt more free in my entire life. The price of that feeling is my youth, the two have never came together, he owned one and now I own the other.