dear dad

It has been a while. I am back in town, and everything feels slightly off-balance, as if the streets themselves notice your absence. I pass our old house, the beach, the corners where memory still lingers like sea mist. Seeing them without you feels like walking through a photograph where one figure has been carefully cut away.

Do you remember racing down those narrow country lanes in the yellow sports car, hedgerows blurring into gold? The wind loud in our ears, the world too small to hold us. Posting postcards to Nan as if we were explorers charting distant lands. The football ground is unchanged—grass worn thin in the same places. It was the one place I felt untouchable. Safe. Not alone. No one could get to me. Not even Mum.

It was a rare and radiant freedom. For a child like me, getting here was never simple—long waits, hard journeys, the careful navigation of a world that didn’t quite fit. But it was always worth it. Catching crabs in cold, cupped hands. Learning how not to drown in the freezing sea, trusting the water for once not to pull me under. The tinny music of the penny arcade. An ice cream float at the Wimpy Bar, sweetness rising through fizz.

Watching you laugh with your mates, easy and bright, I felt something settle inside me. I felt, for once, that I belonged to the same air, the same light. And standing here now, even without you beside me, I still do.

A childhood carved by fear and shadowed by violence. ADHD and dysthymia - restless currents beneath the skin. A quiet excavation of the past, sifting through memory’s dust to uncover the hidden fault lines of a life that trembles endlessly between despair and fleeting light.

PHOTOBASTEI | ZÜRICH 2023