Lifetimes in Moments

1996: 
An infant stands suspended on the belly of his reclined father. The man is beaming with a cheeky, wide-eyed grin. Both faces turn to bewilderment as a miniature fist swings toward the man’s face. The man dodges and grins again and the infant shrieks, unable to contain his surprise. Two souls lost in one another; puppet and puppeteer. A game rigged from the start. A moment too tender to last. 

2001:
Keys jingle and the front door unlocks. A small boy in a red t-shirt races to the answer, sliding in socks like a skater on the tiled floor. The door opens and the smell of a wet leather raincoat wafts in on the dark winter breeze. The shuffling and rustling of suitcase, gift bag and jacket make way for a warm embrace as the boy wraps himself around the man’s legs. The man is proud, yet carries traces of heartbreak, for he cannot fully return home while another of his sons weeps.

2006:

Not yet a teenager, the sun-tanned, fit young boy faces the back window of a car, leaving behind another home in another country. His hands and feet, torn and uprooted from the bushland and the his place amongst it. His father is either called to the new, or running from it. Decades ago, he was the same, always moving places. The man isn’t sure where home is, so he keeps seeking. The boy trusts his father, not yet old enough to know resentment in himself.

2011:

The boy and the father stand back to back. The man is proud to be losing his height advantage. They clash often amidst one another’s expectations and misunderstood love. The man guides him as best he can, toward a path which is not the own. How could it be? The teenager is not yet himself. The father sees, wisdom, foolishness and impatience in his son - qualities he knows to be his own. The son spends hours riding his bike, seeking freedom from others’ ideas of who he is.

2014: 

A boy with the body of a man stands by the hospital bed of a man whose body is letting go. The old man’s life, in suspended animation as the infant boy’s hands once were. Both are in free-fall - unbearably light with no ground in sight. The late teen wears a suit of armour, forged in anticipation of this day. The body on the bed is no longer his father’s, though the old man’s chest still rises and falls with the sound of the ventilator, and the face is recognisable.

2019:
A young man sits on a wooden balcony in the sun, gazing into a forest. He shares his mind with the faces in the trees and the poetry time has inscribed in their bark. He is most comfortable on the cusp of emptiness, where endings are beginnings. His relationship with his father is his relationship with the air he breathes. He is in pieces - some falling; some shattering; some settled. The finest pieces - they float, like dust.