a few days ago, my dad told me to bring with me a tupperware of paksiw na puso ng saging when i go home to my mom’s. “favorite niya yan,” he said, not even using her name or referring to her as my mom. but i knew exactly who he meant.
he was present, though never fully. there, but always felt like he was also somewhat elsewhere. i saw him often enough to know his face, his habits, his voice, the particular way he would look at his phone when reading something, but proximity doesn’t always translate to closeness, and i often felt like i didn’t know what to say around him. we didn’t live in the same house, and when we were together, it often felt like i was orbiting a man already consumed by other things. i always thought he was a father in name and schedule, but emotionally… remote? well, not unreachable, just perpetually occupied. as though some other urgency—work (back when he was working), obligations, a life before me—always took precedence of our time together.
what i remember most, more than any singular conversation, was the way they spoke about each other; always with resentment, a bitterness that lingered long after the words had settled. i was young, but not naive. they never agreed on what happened, only that the other had ruined something. early on i felt like i was left to piece together the ruins.
still, he remembered her favorite dish.
i sobbed myself to sleep that night. i can’t explain why that small gesture unsettled me, provoked that reaction from me the way it did. because i didn’t expect him to remember? because i didn’t think he cared enough to? perhaps because, for a moment, it felt like he hadn’t forgotten her entirely, perhaps there was something of her still lodged in him, quiet and unvisited and maybe regret sounds like that sometimes, not an apology, not even a conversation; just the handing over of a memory.
philosopher martha nussbaum once said that “emotions are not just impulses, but contain judgments about what matters.” i think about that when i think about regret. because regret, at its core, is a kind of admission: that something mattered more than we allowed ourselves to believe at the time.
lately i’ve been thinking about memory a lot. how it softens my edges, reframes me and the way i see people, makes me grieve things i never fully had, or had but never was able to keep. i read once that to remember is literally to re-member—to put back together. perhaps that’s what my dad was doing in that moment, unbeknownst to him. re-membering her.
there’s a passage in ocean vuong’s on earth we’re briefly gorgeous where he writes, “memory is a choice… you can choose what takes you forward and what keeps you there.” i wonder if my dad chose to keep her there, somewhere in the soft recesses of his mind, not because he wanted to dwell but because he never really got the chance to move forward cleanly. i realized some decisions follow you like shadows. some people do, too.
sometimes i think he takes care of me not just because he’s my father but because i’m his last link to her. the one he couldn’t keep, the one he chose and still lost. i wonder if when he looks at me, he sees pieces of her: the shape of my mouth, the way i argue, the same quiet defiance and fire. maybe that’s why he’s sometimes unkind—why love from him feels like punishment, like devotion and penance in equal measure.
maybe i remind him of everything he did wrong.
maybe that’s why he stays.
maybe that’s why it still hurts.
i don’t know if i believe that people ever really change, or if they just learn to carry their mistakes more quietly. but something in me shifted that day. i think about everyone i’ve ever hurt and the way i hurt them and i realize that even the ones who hurt us still remember. and sometimes, they’re haunted by what they remember.
i think about whether i’ll be like him someday. if i’ll also let love rot into silence. if i’ll recall people only through the foods they once loved. if i, too, will try to make amends in small, unspoken ways, long after the damage has already crystallized.
i don’t want to be like that.
This is beautiful! 🥹