A year ago the universe rearranged itself. The stars moved over a nanometer. The moon blinked and blinked again, as if it couldn't believe it's position in the sky. The sun draped itself in a blanket no one else could see but that transformed the hues and tones of the world.

My heart stopped beating and I forgot how I could love others. How paralysing it was to lose you. The love I felt for you had no where to go that I understood or wanted it to. It's only now, a year on, that I find myself in love with my husband again. Perhaps I was so busy adjusting to the new universe I had forgotten what it was to feel properly within it.

There was only one consistencies in this new world: the ocean. The day after, I sobbed my heart out in the salt and everyone I knew let me take the waves I wanted, because all humans lose fathers. I would drown and drown and drown. Every time I came up. Sometimes your ghost would be walking toward the shore of the water as I looked toward the land. I spent all of February swimming, raising money for cancer. Sometimes the current tugged violently, sometimes the seaweed tucked itself between my legs and around my ankles, sometimes I floated. Once the sunrise was so fucking beautiful and the rearranged clouds so fucking pretty I wailed.

I would talk to you in the car. I began to call your presence Ghost Dad. You weren't there. How ridiculous it is that people say such things. They don't know. They aren't there. They just aren't. But we can imagine ghost fathers and ghost mothers and ghost lovers in this world of earthly longing.

I couldn't listen to your music. The notes would form themselves like a bow of razors over the strings of my insides.

https://youtu.be/YFMTFu3UfRQ?si=ydJYGuvYBtrZba52

A year.

I have bought a house by the seaside. I have learnt to knit. I have refound friendships with people I had forgotten. I have a beautiful relationship with my Mum - see, we are looking after her like we promised. I have realized there is absolute joy in this new world just as there was in the old one.

Look at the irises, about to bloom again. The wattle birds racketing in the dawn. The walk down to the river and the gum trees and the wattles splashing yellow about like some mad painters.

I play music and dance around the lounge room. I sing.

You would love it here, Ghost Dad.

With Love,

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