Ceren Ege

If you want, there's these plants by my windowsill in my dorm bedroom or along the window.

If your mom and dad inevitably piss you off up there, just come down, knock one of those plants, and I'll know.

He smiles at me, or smiles at the thought of getting to see his parents again, and he says, I promise, which was the best answer.

Fast forward to about two weeks after November 29th, which was the day that we lost him.

I'm in my bed in my dorm room, and I'm on my phone when the wind knocks down one of the plants in my bedroom.

and spills all over the ground.

And I stand up carefully, I inspect the crime scene, looking for patterns in the soil that might be spelling out like my name or his name or hello or some obvious sign that I remembered I told him not to give me but that I desperately wanted in that moment.

And before I can list the thousand plus logical reasons of why that was a coincidence, I decide to let myself believe that it wasn't.

I decide to let myself believe that my dad is somehow, somewhere with me.

And then I think to myself, oh, he must be pissed that there's an afterlife.

Like, all those years of denying and denying, and now he's around all these people going, we told you so.

And the only thing that my dad hated more than dishonesty was being wrong.

When I first read the theme of this night, it felt like a faded nudge to finally take a leap to listen to that voice recording that I've had aging in my phone for four and a half years.

But I'm trying to be more honest like my father was.

And the truth is, I am not ready to listen to it.

Maybe...

Maybe the true leap in the story is concluding that that sign was not a coincidence and it was from my father.

Maybe there's the natural law of physics to explain that the window was open, the wind knocked down the blinds and knocked down the plant.

But in the same way that my list served me and in the same way that those cards served my father, I'm going to choose to believe that somewhere out there he has and is still caring for me.

in this large and often lonely world, because sometimes holding on is a big enough hurdle.