Hold Me

Picture Story

VI. Hold Me

While my father was alive, he asked me to hold him every day. A minute, two, sometimes longer. He was old, his body had grown light, his bones pressed into me, his breath carried the smell of medicine. Only after he left did I understand what he gave me in that minute — all of his love, compressed into sixty seconds, the way a Dongba priest condenses the whole of Genesis into a single soul-path scroll.

In the painting, two black human figures embrace — no features, no clothing, only silhouettes. That is my father and me, and also every father and son, and everyone who must say goodbye. The scattered colour-specks in the background are the colours he loved in life, the thoughts that drifted through me when my mind wandered in that minute; the grey ink dots are the “I'll hug him tomorrow” deferrals, the regrets that nearly lost me forever.

Every day he was ferrying me — from the busy-ness of this shore to the peace of the other. Now the bridge is broken and that one-minute passage is closed forever.