The Quiet Geometry of My Father
In a world that never truly explodes nor fully stills, I am beginning to understand the constancy of some presences. The kind that don’t demand notice but shape you in silence.
My father is like that — more gravitational pull than blazing comet, more tectonic shift than volcanic display.
He doesn’t enter rooms with thunder or stir awe with poetic metaphors. He exists the way old trees do — rooted and real, barely needing to remind you that they were here long before you knew what shade even meant.
He has never asked to be admired. But still, I watch him the way one watches a river cut its way through the same landscape every day — without spectacle, but with undeniable permanence.
There is no crescendo in the way he loves. No fanfare. Just the quiet collection of years in which he has folded himself around the chaos of my becoming.
When I was younger, he was a constellation I couldn’t read, a presence I felt but didn’t question. Now, adolescence has made everything louder — thoughts, uncertainties, the way I want to be seen and unseen all at once. Yet, he remains unchanged in the most necessary ways. Still anchoring the world when my feet doubt the ground.
He doesn’t always say much. And when he does, it’s rarely extravagant. A dry remark here. A reminder there. The kind of words that stay long after they’re spoken because they were never trying too hard to begin with.
Once, in the middle of a monsoon afternoon, I’d cried over a missed opportunity.
He didn’t offer grand comfort.
Just a quiet: “It’s not the last time the world will feel too small for you.”
I didn’t understand what he meant then. But I do now.
His adoration is not one of proclamations or dramatic gestures. It’s encoded into the daily, mundane, essential acts — like deciphering a manual I didn’t even know I was writing. And sometimes, I think he sees my hesitations before I do. As if he’s memorized the constellations of my doubt.
To me, he is equal parts mapmaker and silent orbit — charting possibilities I’m still too young to imagine and too impatient to trust.
There’s a line I once read about time: that it doesn’t move forward in a straight line, but folds and curls like a ribbon in the wind. If that’s true, then I believe there are versions of us strung across each curve —
Somewhere I’m five and riding on his shoulders, certain he could carry anything.
Somewhere else, I’m ten, and he stands quietly at the kitchen sink, listening without interrupting, even though I’m not making much sense.
Somewhere further still, I might be far away, unsure of everything, except that I once learned what stillness looks like by watching him just… be.
Perhaps the most astonishing part of it all is that he has never needed recognition for any of it.
In some metaphorical geography, he is the unsung architect of my foundations. He carries no blueprint, but still manages to repair what I fracture — without resentment, without show.
If love were measured in moments one chooses not to walk away, then he has loved me in a thousand infinitesimal ways. None flashy, but all irreplaceable.
And it occurs to me now, under the soft hum of an ordinary evening, that even if I become everything I want to be — loud, distant, brilliant in my own complicated ways — I will always fold back into that unspoken truth:
He steadied the world so I could find my footing.
We are still us.
And in every possible version of time,
I find him standing just a few steps behind —
never blocking the light, never asking for applause,
just... making sure I don’t fall before I remember how to fly.
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