This Is Why I Write

 

I've never had the chance to spend time with my grand dad.

Not from my father's side, nor my mother's.

Both of them died before I was born or when I was young...

But whenever sanity brings them to my mind, I write the best things about them.

Advices they never gave, quotes I only hear them say in my dreams and stories I only wish they were actually here to tell me.

Sometimes I imagine finding them beneath an old mango tree, their faces worn by time but softened by love. 

One would be carving a walking stick, the other laughing at a joke he has told a hundred times before.

I would sit between them, a grandson meeting his grandfathers for the first time, and they would speak as though they had been waiting for me all along.

"Life is not a river, boy," one would say, "It is rain. Some seasons will drench you, others will leave you begging the clouds."

The other would smile and add, "And when people leave, do not spend your years chasing their shadows. Light a lamp instead. The living need your warmth more than the dead need your tears."

Then I would tell them about the world they missed. 

About highways stretching across the country, phones that carry faces across oceans, and a grandson who became a poet because silence needed a translator.

I would tell them how hard growing up can be. 

How friends become strangers. 

How love arrives singing and sometimes leaves without a goodbye. 

How some nights a man's heart feels heavier than the roof above him.

And they would listen.

Not to answer. Not to judge.

Just... listen.

The way grandfathers are supposed to.

But morning always comes. 

And it will come.

The mango tree will disappear. 

The voices will fade. 

The dream will end.

And I will wake up alone with a pen in my hand.

With the sun up. To a world without any of them.

Without any of my two grandfathers. 

So you ask why I write...

I write because memory deserves a body. 

I write because absence deserves a name, because somewhere between imagination and grief, I have built two grandfathers from stories, hope, and poetry. 

And though we never shared a single afternoon, they have somehow become the men who taught me that love can travel through blood, through time, through death itself.

After all, some people leave before they can tell their stories; 

So their grandchildren become poets and tell the stories for them.

So join me... let's write. Let's make stories together. 

© amimoh