Phantom flutes ring in your ears, well past the finish of the music. The kind you get from a migraine or the neurotic howl of cicadas in the summer. The kind that hangs eerily at the back of your neck, a reminder of the thin veil separating real from imagined. The kind that makes your mind chase its own tail. It can’t be (but it is) but it can’t be and so on, into the silence that is not silence. Your father slides around in the back of the car. What slides around in the boot is not really your father but rather a shadow, or an echo or a remembering. Reminds you of shelling peas as a child. Pull out the orbs from between the fleshy green lips, eat the innards until the skin sinks in on itself into a hollowed husk. The body in the boot is just such a vessel, empty now that he has left, just epidermis and bones and irises that will break down into smaller compounds. Organic matter reduced to biology. And in the absence of soul, a peculiar cold sort of smell if a smell can be described like that. Metallic almost, like when you press your head to the concrete as a child and feel the vastness of the earth creep into you.

You felt him leave the room, like a lifting of something in you up and up as if you too were going with him. Like an ache or the foreshadow of an ache you cannot quite reach into yet, but know is lurking. And you know that someday, below consciousness, you’ll look around to find yourself already there, in that pocket of sorrow for which you’ve lived in waiting. Grief finds you here, without announcing arrival or departure, in the before and the after. You were born blue with it, already inseparable from your little body. And it lies sleeping nonlinearly through time, until wakened or perhaps it is you, asleep until called.

You can feel its gaze.

He is no longer here.

All this is known to you, just as you knew the CD made its final course minutes ago and yet.

You’re finding it hard to let go.

So many memories attached to the ensemble of skin in the trunk. You put another CD on for him, for you, it’s unclear. The flutes begin anew with their mournful atonement. His voice is there too, explaining simple addition and you are small again, so very small and you hear him smoking a cigarette and putting spuds on the stove and calling the dog. You learnt how to tie the laces on your shoes last week, but you pretend you forgot so he will bow down and do it for you and you will feel like a princess. There’s the sound of him being present and then the non-sound of absence, his anger his sadness his rage fuse with his love and his quiet contentment, cigars in the evening and watching the birds. You know him after a good day at work and after a bad day. You know him most in the water. At the beach, flying paper in the sky, your little hand in his. You’re on the sand watching the sun birthing backwards, up and out of the blue. You always come for sunrises together when neither of you can sleep and everyone else can. You’re in the waves, and they are big, but he is bigger. You know he loves being here, thrown around, passing over responsibility of adulthood for the ocean to carry for just a moment. For that one moment, you understand each other. As just two bodies capable of joy. You love him most here, in memory, in the freest form you will ever see him. You watch him put spuds on again, this time you’re older and the dog is even older and blind by now in a house that hasn’t been your house for years. You hear the sound of him weeping somewhere in the middle of his life, and you pretend you didn’t, flushed with embarrassment and childish panic. Somewhere toward the end you remember the same feeling of helplessness seeing him demented in the garden, naked and hunting for rats on all fours, like a dog. Memories are cruel, they are inescapable and omnipresent, and they are not separated from the present as we lead ourselves to believe. Some memories are smooth and vivid, obsolete. Others are hard to hold onto and shift in your hands just as you grasp them. Sound, non-sound. You are shivering, whether it’s the cold or the rememberings or your father in the back of the truck it’s hard to tell. And it is cold out, the kind that seeps into your bones and makes you grow backwards. Everyone around here grows backward. It’s the way it is done in small, bitter places. Hunched shoulders and crooked necks, always carrying winter on the back. An icy, inner dead sort of existence. You grew against it here, you remember it well. You haven’t been back in a while.  It’s probably what took Dad, you think to yourself. Not even the high summer can thaw a person like that. You’re still shivering, and the light is disappearing, slowly the sky drenching itself in night. You will need to stop soon. Put diesel in the tank. The town isn’t too far off. Dim-witted sheep stare at you forlornly on your journey.

The hills stretch on until, in the very far off distance, the sky meets the sea. It’s getting close to dark now. The last of the sun drowning herself in the water. You think distantly of joining her. You’ve thought about it before as you assume most people have. Not in an actualised way or with the desperate romanticism of pubescent imagination. But in the way where you’ve lived half your life to wake up one day and realise your existence is rather small, exhausting, useless. No greater meaning made itself apparent, as you – without ever putting a formed thought to it – always assumed it would. God never found you, nor you him. Even in the darkest of places where he seemed to reach out to others, you found only the abyss within yourself. And the things you filled your life with seemed equally as dreary. Just motions to go through until death decided to remove you from your shell, take you elsewhere. Deceitful almost, as they were pretending to be anything but distraction in the daunting realisation of inevitable time. So pointless everything. Your daughters, grown up and distant, had the same dissatisfactions you had with your old man although you tried so hard. You were not ready to be a mother, the way most women must realise they never will be. That moment when your body splits and something so fragile and small emerges from your very insides. And then you stepped into motherhood, this anxious state of nurture that had lurked in your belly before you ever housed a child in it. And it’s as familiar as daughterhood, has the same anxious heartbeat, always holding life and death in your very fabric.

And then there’s your sisters, to whom you exist as a reminder of a painful past. They will be fuming red hot chimney smoke from their heads by now. They aren’t particularly fond of you either. They love you, of course, the way you must love someone who grew with you in the softest of places, childhood as shared thing. But fondness implies warmth and there is none of that lost between the three of you. The way childhood ties you together also splits you at the seams; you cannot spend too much time together or it comes bubbling back up through the cracks. They will be following you when they realise you’ve taken him. There will be mayhem. They will think you all the odder, perhaps insane. Perhaps you are.

You just weren’t quite ready to say goodbye.