A Ghost Town

When I was a child, one of my recurring nightmare was waking up in a ghost town. I would run around in dimmed empty streets crying my lungs out to the unsettling quietness asking if anyone was out there. Some nights were worse than others. I would wake up someplace I know like this mall near my home I used to visit every weekend, only there was absolutely nobody in sight. Growing up I realized remnants of the distress I suffered from those dreams survived and later unfolded into a creeping fear of waking up to find the life as I know it has vanished overnight.

It might be veiled in something as trifling as how I favor adhering to some sense of routine more than having to swing everything by the day, some sort of assurance — be it in naivety or not — that what today holds will not be too far off from what yesterday offered. But the same fright was also present during other moments of some significance in my life. Like the night I figured I would be leaving for my post-graduate study. It petrified me immensely to be parting in abrupt with what I have grown accustomed to and rather fond of these past years, like images shifting from one to another so swiftly they became a reeling blur.

I have been trying to come to terms with the daunting reality that change is an inextricable part of life. Ultimately, I will wake up one day and find that everything has slipped through my fingers in what would feel like just over a night. In my pondering of such day, I found myself drifting back instead to the ones I spent with my grandfather and a dear friend of his.

My grandfather was born in the early 40s. Although he was way too young to remember it, he was already around when my country declared its independence. He lived through political turmoils and economic crises I have only learned of in history. He was there when the swamps were cleared out of the corners of my hometown and his own as concrete roads were paved. He watched buildings raced towards the sky and mankind towards beyond.

He must have lived his whole life within these innumerable remembrances. Yet for some reason, he has a particularly vivid recollection of the neighborhood my father grew up in. One of the neighbors, who was also a colleague, was a dear friend that my father ended up living with in Hong Kong for almost six years. He was my mother’s employer then and thus the rest was history.

Every time my grandfather visited with his dear friend during the holidays, in which I would eagerly tag along, they would take a long reminiscent walk through a world that has outgrown their abiding friendship. They embraced each other along the way through exchanges of tales of bygone days. The places they have seen torn down and rebuilt time and again. The withering customs of their generation they were leaving behind in reluctance.

I watched the light in their eyes flickered ever so faintly as they were passing by each grave belonging to those they have loved and lost. Year after year the burial grounds grew larger and this part of the trek went longer. Still I saw those flickering lights, like candles dancing in woe against the blowing gust. But almost everyone they had known were now lying before them I wondered if the flame would one day cease to live as after enough of it, griefs no longer taste like sorrow.

My grandfather‘s dear friend passed away late last year. In my mourning I thought of a world they used to recognize, one that only existed within their entwining memoirs. In his dear friend’s absence, the path they used to take on their walks evaporated and now that world became forever bounded solely to my grandfather’s memory. Then the question remains, what does he see now in life under such disparate light? An 80 years old in this strange land crowded with even stranger faces. I imagined what it must entail, and I surmised it will resemble waking up somewhere uncharted surrounded by no familiar figures — very much like a ghost town.

I would like to believe that my grandfather finds other relics from his years to be contenting, like the charming life he has provided for my grandmother, for my father and his two siblings, and eventually for me and my cousins. But everything comes at a price. So perhaps this is the price of a long-lived age; to slowly and unwittingly lose a grip of the only life you have known until the day it is entirely severed from the one you’re living in now.

Sooner or later, I will too depart for my ghost town. I know now that it will look different from the one I kept returning to in my childhood but still is unbearable all the same. I am reminded of those burning candles again, and how their light endures the seething air. But just shortly before its wick gives in, the same air must have felt like a brisk blow in defiance of the scorching heat from the fire, putting it to rest at last. On another occasion my grandfather told me what his brother had thought of death, “In the end, it is our birthright.”.