The details of that day are fuzzy. I don’t remember if it was a Friday, if it was a half-day, if the weather was nice. I don’t remember if my father was the one to pick me up, or if he sent someone for me. I don’t remember if he took me to my favorite restaurant, or if we got dessert after. I don’t even remember how we got to the mall and what we did for a majority of the time. But it felt like a half-day on a Friday, with the sun bursting through thickets of leaves, the endless possibilities of the weekend rolling out before me on the open road, heavy metal blasting as we headed for the mall with my father at my side. 

In my memories my father is a seven foot giant that stands so tall his face is shrouded in darkness. In reality, he stands at 5’9, a skinny and lanky body, a full head of salt and pepper hair, a crooked back, and surprisingly straight teeth despite having no braces. My family laughs when he does not intend to be funny and we are silent when he cracks jokes. It was fun to impersonate him: the amount my mother laughed or shuddered was an indicator of how good the impression was. We’d often copy how he blew up at his hair when he was thinking, how he paced around the room in front of his computer, how he would say “Sonny Bunny Super Genius!” when he solved a problem. I knew all of this from my mother and her stories. She loves to tell us about the time, after my father moved out, when my older brother who must have been eight or nine at the time looked to my mother and asked her, “Where’s Papa?” When my mother tells this story she always looks beyond me with wonder, her eyes wide, likely looking into the past years of her marriage and she says “Your father had already been gone for two months and your brother only noticed then. How messed up is that?” Although I never saw it first-hand she tells the story so much that it feels like it’s a part of my past. Seeing my father was like spotting the Loch Ness monster, but to spend a day with him, alone, as the youngest of four kids, was like God answering your prayers themself. 

I don’t remember much from my parents’ separation, only that it happened before I left the Philippines. When I look back it’s as if I’m watching a damaged film reel, the camera tilted upwards forever at the height of everyone’s hips. The tape jumps and skips years, as if trying to chronologically order itself but to no avail. I’m sure there are countless lost days, but there is one moment restored from the erosion of time, that glints like a golden card in the darkness of divorce.

My memory begins in the middle of the escalator. We ascended slowly. I was looking up at the grand arched ceilings, shafts of light beaming from the sky and I thought to myself that this was that Stairway to Heaven Led Zeppelin was singing about. My gaze lowered and I caught a glimpse of my gigantic father. This time I could see his face illuminated by God’s spotlight, his hand reaching towards me like God in The Creation of Adam. Those hands have always been unreachable. They were hands that developed software, hands that had no memory of a parents’ love. They were hands that taught me how to cut a steak, hands that fixed my shirt up and fed me dinner. They were tender hands, unfaithful too, that wandered over women’s bodies. Guilty hands that trembled as they erased their history with every swing of his golf club at the driving range growing calloused and rough with every escapade. These were hands wrought with longing, loss and love and now they were reaching for me and it’s as if the messiah came down from the heavens, and I rising step by step, my hand perpetually outstretched, reaching for the unattainable, finally took hold of his finger. His sandpaper fingers. There we were: The Father and his creation, his namesake, soaring into the ether. 

The movie theater was on this floor, Kidz Station (Toys R’ Us), Datablitz (Gamestop), The Original Jamaican Beef Patty Store, and most of all Powerstation(Arcade). I remember the smell of the popcorn that came in like a breeze, carrying alongside it hints of the golden crust and the garlic, onion and curry seasoned beef. I was wearing my school uniform: gray shorts, black dress shoes, and a white button down with a towel tucked into the back of my shirt that’s called tawas to prevent catching a cold because I sweat so much after I played with the kids at school. On my shirt was a red and gold patch sewn on with my name and class. That made me puff my chest out with pride and arrogance, flaunting it for the whole mall to see, as if they knew I was my father’s namesake. 

When we finally reached the third floor we played a game in the arcade and I got a golden card, something I never got before. That day my father began a tradition of imbuing objects with meaning, of creating spiritual bridges through inanimate things like a priest blessing a rosary bracelet. 

Keep this with you and every time you look at it remember this day. Perhaps he knew that saying goodbye would become routine. Though the golden card is lost now, I see it in the darkness of memory, in the darkness of those years, a glint, a glimpse into the day when I held my creator’s hand.