What has happened to us? Ærynn and I used to be so optimistic. We used to revel so much in our "freedom", rejoicing in the fact that we are living away from our parents and our family. So happy that we don't have to deal with Pinoy busy-bodiness...

... and then my father died.

He's been dead for a year now... and we have not gone out for the trips we were so proud of being able to do so freely. We don't go out in the weekends anymore. We stay at home.

It was very presumptuous of us to have assumed that we can go out and have fun while everyone back home would have remained as they were, ready to be for us what we want them to be when we got home. We didn't think that they, too, have the right to change.

I will never be able to drive my Dad along the Great Ocean Road. I will never experience the loveliness of showing him around the libraries here. I will never be able to show him how sophisticated we have become. It is the badly itching toe of a foot long amputated.

Life sucks. Death sucks.

Ærynn and I have promised to attempt to recover this year.