P's graduation

  The day before P's convocation ceremony, I went to order a bouquet of flowers and then visited Mum at the temple. It was a lovely peaceful day. I told Mum, P was going to graduate tomorrow in case she forgot and we were going to watch P for her.

  L had arranged to come my house in the afternoon and we were messaging all the way on the train and while I walked home to coordinate timings. Strangely, the moment when I reached home, my handphone blacked out and stopped working. I charged it for hours after, but nothing happened. I switched my sim card into Mum's handphone - at P's university the next day, I told Dad about it... that somehow I had the strange feeling that Mum wanted me to bring her handphone to P's ceremony so my handphone went flat. We laughed, and I joked, that would mean my handphone would be miraculously resurrected the next day.

  And it did.

   But all that happened after, and in the moment of P's graduation, there was an unsaid shared consciousness of what could not be there. As Dad shared later, we miss her most on days like these.

     I knew Mum was watching over P in her usual classic way - smiling at P's penchant for high heels. Those are my shoes, Mum. But, those shoes were found by P, ever the beauty scavenger. She's taking her first step into the adult world now, into a place that we can no longer protect.

     We can only watch now, Mum, only watch.