Every time I read or write about my father, I feel his strange presence. I cannot quite describe it. I am frightened by his existence inside my memory. It is so real, so vivid, that it does not feel like a memory, it feels like he is sitting right next to me, above my ear, reviewing everything I am thinking of him or writing about him.

It is startling and peculiar. I don’t know if it is something I yearn for, or simply something that is there. My father lives inside me, and I cannot rid myself of his existence. Not that I wish to, but it haunts me in my most vulnerable states.

At 3:00 AM, when I go downstairs to get water, I make sure not to make any noise so I don’t disturb him. Then I realize it is no longer the case I may make as much noise as I wish. Yet my attempt at silence brings him to memory, and that memory comes to life. I begin to smell his scent, his vibrance, in the utter silence, in the utter darkness.

At 4:00 AM, when I open my laptop to journal, he suddenly makes himself comfortable in my field of consciousness. I begin to ask questions I usually asked of him—and then I find myself utterly paralyzed, unwilling to move. If I do, I might lose the momentum of the answers he gives me, of the scattered warmth I experience in his presence.

Inside the olive field, his presence enters my nostrils through the smell of freshly watered soil. When I am roaming around the trees under the sunlight, he comes and speaks to me through the sounds of the wind on the branches. He tells me what the tree needs to bloom, and I realize I am the tree he wishes to bloom.

At times I find it ironic that he has passed, and yet he feels more alive than before. In my dreams, in memory, I can perceive everything so clearly—something I was unable to do when he was alive. His absence, his death, has made him more real in my life than his presence ever did. The distance that stood between us evaporated, just as his body did under the ground. Now he lives closer to me than ever—inside me, in the parts of himself he replicated in me. In the things I cannot explain to my mother. In the warmth of his virtual appearance.

I sometimes feel somewhat insane. I cannot explain how real he seems when I find him in my dreams—the things we converse about, the irony of the living and the dead. The absurdity that fuels our connection. The absurdity of his death, the absurdity of life, of the living, the dead, the stars, the universe, God.

My mind tells me it is merely a way to soothe myself for this loss. But there is nothing to soothe, only something to experience. If it has all been a lie, then I am grateful I experienced such a beautiful lie. For when the mind is loud, such a lie cannot take form. Only in silence, when I hear my soul’s echo, do I find his own lingering—loud and vibrant.