Last week Dylan and I walked past a Toys R Us. I found myself wondering whether anything there still interested him.
He just shrugged.
He wasn't being difficult. He wasn't sad about it. He had simply moved on — completely, without looking back. The shop was still there. He just didn't need it anymore.
He didn't lose anything. I did. And there was nowhere to put that.
It wasn't grief about growing up, exactly. It was the asymmetry. He's fine. He's happy — genuinely, easily happy, just in a different direction now. The loss is mine alone to carry. He doesn't know it exists.
That's what I kept coming back to. Not the passing of time. The fact that I'm the only one marking it.
Everything around us felt like it was reorganising itself around a future I hadn't agreed to. The SkillsFuture booth. The screens. Two young people with lanyards rearranging brochures that nobody was taking.
The ah lian at the Singtel counter looked like she hadn't slept all night. She slid the card across without looking up. I thought: we are all just here, doing what we're supposed to do.
I stood there with a gift card and felt, briefly, like one of them. Holding something out. Waiting for someone to stop.
He lights up when he takes it. He still does that — that hasn't gone. But then: He's already typing.
I didn't want to explain the pause before that line. The pause is the whole poem. And you don't explain the moment you open your hand.