Time and tide wait for no man

Life certainly goes on. It doesn’t sympathise with anybody’s feelings or experiences – it slowly and steadily marches on.

Tick, tick, tick.

I still keep my younger brother’s mobile number on my phone’s address book – for some reason, I didn’t want to delete it, as it forms a link to the past when I used to send messages or called before he passed away in 2008. I still keep my eldest sister’s phone number too – although she’s no longer with us. Deleting the numbers feels like a betrayal of his memory.

Then today, looking through my Whatsapp contact list, I noticed that there’s a profile picture associated with my brother’s old mobile number – and an agribusiness website. I suppose after more than ten years, the telco in Indonesia has passed on my brother’s phone number to a new customer.

*sigh*

Some of you may find my behaviour strange and illogical – but if you have ever lost somebody close to you, you’d understand. Maybe it’s time that I deleted his entry from my address book. I remember a scene from CSI:NY’s pilot episode from 2004 – the last scene stays with me even after all these years. In the episode it’s revealed that Mac (the main character) had a wife who perished on 9/11. He said this:

I used to sit like this with my wife. Her name was Claire. She died, on 9/11. Nobody saw it coming. I was cleaning out the closet the other day and I found this beach ball. And I remembered it was my wife who blew it up. I never told anybody this, but I got rid of everything that reminded me of Claire; too painful. The one thing I couldn’t throw away … was that beach ball. Her breath is still in there.