For Arthur my dad – Happy birthday .
There are mornings when the silence thickens
into the shape of memory.
The air folding with the faintest pressure,
as if your hands, the ones that knew both engine grease
and how to carry a child’s tenderness,
reaches through without asking.
Even though you were loud most times,
I remember your silent acknowledgements
The places in my memory,
Where you should have said something, Something, perhaps reprimanding,
And you didn’t.
And in that quite moment, I became a little bit more of me
And comfortable with it.
Your old yezdi with me sitting on the tank.
I remember the way you leaned into the wind, took corners too fast
because joy was worth the risk,
And you knew how to hold on, for both of us.
And today when I turn corners,
The unknown does not scare me.
I can feel the sturdy thump of the bike and your heart
Your laughter—loud and unapologetic echoes in the corners of the day.
It never needed to be contained or dimmed.
Some fathers build fences. So did you.
But I suspect, you took quite pleasure
In seeing me break them.
Not be contained.
And yet in the very same hands,
the pencil became a wand and created beauty.
I feel that creation flow through my fingers
As the artist lives on…
Now and then, in the small, unguarded acts—
a drying towel, a pause in the mirror, a breath I didn’t mean to take—
You arrive not as a ghost,
but as the ground beneath me.
And I know now— that daring is no longer yours alone.
It lives in me, quiet and steady,
Guiding the turns I never thought I’d take.
And I remember again:
I am still in safe hands.
~Rhea
