Reunion

As a child, my father was often away, and his absence shaped my sense of space, not as empty, but as waiting. His recorded voice telling stories steadied me, a low murmur that wrapped me in warmth.  His words folded around the silence, giving it form.

I had just turned 10 that summer when my mother and I traveled to Nepal to meet him. Time stretched between absence and arrival. Cows drifted through the streets; the air thick with stillness. Dust rose and settled like incense, holding traces of passage. Amid the clamor of horns and voices, prayer wheels turned quietly under passing hands. Even in the noise, a kind of silence persisted, one that gathered memory, proximity, and distance into the same space.

Only years later did I begin to understand those moments as structured:

how absence organizes perception
how presence emerges through it