Missing in Action

So it's been a while - I had almost forgot I had a blog. So much has happened in the last year and my place and emotions have been tested and trialed. I'm still somewhat trying to sort myself out.

Last April just after Art Collage finished I flew home to Australia to visit my parents - My Dad had been unwell for some time and we didn't expect him to last much longer. I hadn't been back to Australia in nearly 10 years. That's how long it had been since I had seen Dad. I know part of me was avoiding the issue; living so far away, it's easier to dissociate yourself from the pain and issues of possible loss.

Despite distance we have always been a close family. Just the three of us and our pets along the way. Distance had always been apart of our lives. We moved around a fair bit when i was really young, and when i was in primary school Dad was away for work months at a time. Then I was in boarding school away from them both, so I grew up loving my parents at a distance. That's not to say we didn't have time together, we did - in reflection it was about half and half, and i have memories so precious to me that they still shine clear as the day they happened in my mind - However, I didn't really hesitate to take off and live my own life, move to a different state and go to University, then move overseas and get married. So for the last 20 years I haven't really spent much time with my parents, my Dad even less so; Yet we were still close and his presence in this world gave me tremendous strength.

In my mind, my Dad had always been the rock, that presences that held me to the ground emotional. Like a gravitational force that I always refereed too when conflicted emotionally; I'm struggling to live with his absence and I find that so strange seeing absence was such a large part of growing up. It's been 12mths on the 3rd of July and I am yet to grieve. My love for my Father is so deep I'm just to afraid to face it. It's unhealthy and it's not just affecting me mentally but also physically. The release needed is so bottled up that it's leaking out in so many other ways. So after 12mths I've realised it's enough. I will write. I will write memories, feelings, blunt and honest. Living away from Mum and my home environment, memories are all I have to help me face the loss. Thinking them feels to translucent and to easy to compartmentalise into rational feeling without confrontation. So I will write.