Tribolum.com Making Light of Things

Faith left for Singapore today. I come home to an apartment once filled with her laughter and presence, now rather devoid of life as my sister and I walk in the front door. It is a rather weird apartment, considering there are doors leading outside in every room. Thanks to funding from our parents, we have made it out to be a place resembling a home. Faith was involved in the whole process - from the buying of kitchen utensils, to the little towels that hang on the refrigerator door. Her touch is to be found everywhere I turn. In a sense it torments me to know her so close yet not have her around. I am reminded of what the poet Conrad Aiken wrote,

Music I heard with you was more than music, And bread I broke with you was more than bread; Now that I am without you; all is desolate; All that was once so beautiful is dead. Your hands once touched this table and this silver, And I have seen your fingers hold this glass These things do not remember you, beloved, And yet your touch upon them will not pass. For it was in my heart you moved among them, And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes; And in my heart they will remember always — They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.

Every parting is harder than the last. When I came back in summer and was leaving for Arizona once more, we thought that the parting was hard because of the prolonged period of time I had spent by her side over summer. The three weeks she spent with me here is nowhere as long, yet her departure has been rather hard to take. I think the hardest part of it is the thought of her in an airplane alone. I hope the feelings of loneliness will be somewhat quenched when I hear her voice over the phone and know that she is home, safe and sound among people who love her.

Now I delve in my solitude. I find her hair on the carpet and miss her all over again. I do not know if I can last my whole stay here. I pray that God grant me strength.