“and though I can’t recall your face—I still got love for you, your braids like a pattern, love you to the Moon and Saturn.”

https://open.spotify.com/track/6KJqZcs9XDgVck7Lg9QOTC?si=e20ee52168524056

Alexa sighed as she held the papers of prescription in her hand.

Earlier this morning, she got a call from her father’s psychiatrist for a quick meeting of what he called ‘a progress’. He was practising near her area so she didn’t have to drive all the way to Bogor, but since Alexa still didn’t want to drive Nicholas’ car, she chose to go by train. The meeting went for an hour, and now she was waiting for her train to come as she tried to digest whatever medical words her father’s psychiatrist just told her.

The doctor mentioned a lot of things—a possibility, one might say, but it was a sign she could not trust just yet. After the latest test they did on him, he was able to remember few things they had told him the day before. She knew a progress was still a progress, but she would consider it as a magnificent proportion of miracle to have her father back, or to have him remember her, even just the faintest memory. She only needed him to recognize his daughter, that’s all. Such simple wish now seemed even more impossible than finding a new earth to occupy.

She wished she would not be alone in this fight, but even that was a luxury she could not afford.

Most of the time, she felt as though she was undeserving to complain. It was easier to just surrender to where the water would take her without having to fight its current—but the thing was, it was a long ass river and she craved for a dry land. It had been cold for too long that her skin started to crinkle. She wanted to give up, she wanted to finally disperse at the sea.

To be so weary of life at the age of 26 felt utterly pathetic, but even she got sick of self-pity.

However she could not give up—not if she still wanted to taste her father’s love again. Everyone kept saying that he would return to health soon, and yet the more she saw him, the more of a stranger she became to her father. She could feel as though his recollection of her childhood was slowly fading away alongside the loss of her father’s memory.

So this is how it feels, mourning over someone who is still breathing.

Alexa didn‘t want to cry in broad daylight, so she chose to shove the papers into her bag.

An announcement woke her from her reverie, in which it informed the passenger that the train would arrive late due to a technical difficulties. She sighed, then her stomach cried in exchange and that was how she remembered no food had entered her stomach since last night. She was not that hungry, but it seemed important to keep her belly fed, so she decided to go out of the train station and walked without a destination.

Her feet took her to a humble beef soup place. It looked like a home that had been modified into a small shop, with few plastic chairs on the outside and a small fan to keep the airflow going. She didn’t want to eat a hot soup in the middle of a hot day, but there was something about this place that she kept on gravitating towards it. So she followed her steps.

An old lady served her the menu, and she picked what the lady recommended. Mom would be around her age if she’s still around, Alexa wondered to herself. Then she realized why she felt invited—the smell reminded her of her mom’s cooking. Her mom used to cook her beef rib soup a lot for Alexa didn’t prefer intense spices on her food, and that was partly the reason other than it tasted like a hug.

Alexa missed her father, but she missed her mother even more. She was not one to cave into her grief, but today she didn’t have the strength to fight it—so she just let herself feel things. Just for today, she wanted to let herself be.

And God, even the soup tasted exactly like her mom’s.

“Alexandra?”

She looked up—and who else would she find other than Atlassian, sitting on the table in front of her, with a woman on her late 60s.

“Atlas?”

“Sendirian?”