Manifestation. Power comes from a profound connection with wisdom accompanied by talent and skill.
Kong Ming 220 – 280 CE
The week before my father died, my sister and I had him with us as we cleaned the house where five generations of my maternal family had lived. Myself included. This was my mother’s house, and her father, my grandfather, was now in a nursing home with only six more months left on his 103-year lease on life. I sold the house to pay for G’Pa’s medical bills.
My father was lost in the grip of age-related dementia. He no longer knew who my sister or I was; he knew we cared for him. He sat on the couch behind us as we took down the 100-year-old curtains and rods from the living room windows. We had to wear dust masks. The curtains hadn’t been cleaned in 72 years. He wanted to help, and we told him we needed his help. It made him feel good about himself. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the strength to stand. We pretended it was fine, and we handed him old screws the color of dark brass patina to take charge of and supervise their safekeeping.
When the day was over, My sister and I went different ways. My father turned and said with absolute genuine certainty that he loved me as my sister held his arm to hold him up. The look on his face told me he didn’t know why his middle son should be adored; he just knew he did. He was gone a week later. He had just turned 84. My mother had preceded him, and our extended family was gone when my grandfather left us. Only my siblings and our children remain for now.
On the way back to the hotel, I recalled the vision of my goodbye to Anne. I called her my jungle wife although we lived more like jungle spirits according to nature than a married couple. When I left her at the farm we built and traveled alone back to the village where my ride back to civilization waited, I carried the haunting sadness in her eyes with me. Even her years of monastery living couldn’t overcome the awful hurt we shared in this only and final separation.
My mission was hailed a success by my superiors. I had detailed the ecosystem, the trade routes, culture, thriving flora and fauna, and methodologies of successful crop cultivation with stunning details all fed to me from Anne in her daily life connected to her beloved nature and her skill at transforming nature into resources that benefitted the area and people. Her gifts to me were boundless.
Experiences in Africa, Asia, Europe, and other nameless places filled my life and transformed my vision of the world and its people. There is immeasurable pain and fleeting moments of joy, contentment, and gratitude. There is love, a deep and spiritual love when shared, becomes the most profound sadness when it must end.
That night, many scenes juxtaposed on my presence of mind. My mind played vignettes with no music or sound of sweet words, just those haunting large, brown eyes above freckled cheeks so soft and smooth. It seemed an assault to me to abrade her skin with my beard and calloused hands. In time, our conversations filtered back into my mind just like the day they were uttered.
Anne took an interest in me because she knew she was half-tied to my ancestral culture and half tied to her mother’s Asian ancestry. She wanted to know me in every way possible to understand her father’s ghost and to give respect to his life. He was a soldier, and I was a soldier, our similarities were memorized by Anne through her mother’s stories about the man she loved. She carried the hallmarks of both ancestries in her bones and supple flesh. It compelled her closer to me until we fell into the same fate as her parents.
I no longer understood how I could leave that tiny paradise or Anne for the call of duty and loyalty to an oath of allegiance to my country. As it turns out, those became hollow and wasted virtues because my efforts did not help provide a better world, a safer and more secure society, or bring opportunity with equality and justice for anyone abroad or at home. Those ideals preached by iconic leaders seemed like trickery. Young men and women threw their lives away for a dream world. This was the bitterness I fought that night, even as Anne’s voice filled my ears with joy, and the memory of her gave me comfort and the desire to live.
Later, I realized it was more about the few people I allowed in my inner ring and their profound impact on my life. They were what mattered; in that case, I’d given every ounce of myself to them. In return, I learned that permanence is the memory of saying goodbye.
Hyperion Sky 
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