Dear K,

Today, it has been seven years since
you died. For the past two years we have missed this anniversary. I have
remembered it afterwards and kept it to myself. The Other Harf tells me
it was the same for him.

This is grief turning into memories.
This is the bold colour of your presence in our lives fading. Not disappearing,
just fading.

I think the reason this year I’ve remembered
this anniversary is because I’ve been going through old emails over the
past couple of weeks and came across several from July, 2003. I’d requested your friends to
send me anecdotes, memories of you, the year after your death. They were
funny, sad, poignant, and it was as though you were right there, standing
behind me, chuckling away, reading them over my shoulder. Yes, it was totally weird how you used to lay your trousers flat on the floor with all the
wrinkles smoothed out when you crashed on the couch overnight! And as for
your appalling Faux French? Hey, at least *I* understood you, mange tout, c’est vous plais.

Now when I think of you, it is because
my eyes catch the framed picture on the wall of the study. Miss 8.10 and
I were creating it on the lounge floor of 3 Kenwood Gardens when that phonecall
came. It reminds me that was what we were doing before 9.30am on the 21st
of July, 2002, before you left.

I sometimes remember your funeral. How the sky was so vividly blue that day. And how the Other Harf threw his beautiful
eulogy onto your grave. How it felt like I was crying from my very depths
of my soul.

Sometimes I think of you, when I sit
on our verandah. You are beside me, smoking your 20th ciggie for the day and drinking your fourth cup of tea. Sometimes I think of you when we’re at the beach when Miss 8.10 and I are collecting shells; you loved to beachcomb too.

But most of all I think, oh how I wish
you were still here.

Fi

x