Staccato

Too Close To Home

"You're coming to my place today!" I yell.

Efrim lifts his brows in wonder. "Today?"

"Yes!"

"Okay."

"Yes, my mom said at 4 o'clock sharp."

"What time's it now?"

"Why is he not here yet?"

"Linda, my son is heartbroken."

~*~

October 29, 2014

Villa Riviera, Long Island.

Our parents are away at a pretty important convention in the Turtle Bay neighbourhood of Manhattan, the same neighbourhood wherein is situated the United Nations Headquarters.

Today, they aren't at the UN headquarters, but at a convention center where congressmen, diplomats, businessmen, scientists and some celebs, too, have gathered for yet another talk on climate change.

Dad has been, since the past three to four years, busier than he had ever been, even more than he was during the time he had been trying to develop the OS that would go on to run the computers of the world.

He was always on 'some' trip to 'some' foreign country to meet with 'some' people, or just 'away'. The 'some' and 'away' that had always remained vague to me when I was little began to make sense as I grew older. As I began to comprehend more about the world around me.

It came to be replaced by the understanding that it was a trip to 'Geneva' to meet some scientists at 'CERN', to Russia's Roscosmos, to NASA Jet propulsion laboratory, California.

He has been reading up a lot on rockets.

If he shuts himself away to read, or if he isn't always around, he overcompensates it later with a family trip to Jamaica or to the tiny island we own in Seychelles.

Or in the way we love best - sit with us all together in the family room, right here in the sanctity of our home, and talk to us, for not just an hour after dinner, but all through the evening - about his plans, his dreams, his goals. And that, we know, have always been to make the world a better place, to make as many contributions to the development of cutting-edge technology that would inexorably push humanity forward for good.

Listening to those plans and dreams and goals has been, for me, the way I weaved my own ideas around that first seed of curiosity that was sown in me when I was as young as four or five years old - the curiosity of infinite mirror reflections, and strange, parallel worlds.

And I had felt a need, nine years ago, to babble all my thoughts to someone my own age. I did find that someone that first day of kindergarten, but all he had done for me was leave behind a void and an unfulfilled dream.

And all that I have done since have always been something to fill that void, to realise that unfulfilled dream.

All my deep interest in physics and math, my love for lengthy calculations that put me into a beautiful abstraction - my way to cope, my way to use this mental tool to figure out reality. Because what I, like my dad, always want to do is to keep figuring out. I'm scared of slipping into a shroud of darkness, or patching holes not with concrete solutions but mere shadows.

And this love and this need and this want is the most important thing to me. This patching up of void, this struggle for the realisation of an unfulfilled dream. Everything else - getting into mensa, or acing every exam - is something that came as a consequence of it.