DAD, I STILL NEED YOU

The gate squeaked the same way it always had.

He paused before pushing it open, staring at the rusted bars like they might hold him back. The yard was overgrown, the grass taller than he remembered, and the old neem tree had lost half its leaves. It had been twelve years since he walked through this place as a son. Now, he walked in as a stranger — and an orphan.

The house felt smaller.

Dust floated in the air like time that hadn’t settled. The walls still wore that faded mint green paint his mother had picked out. The calendar on the fridge was stuck in last November, the day before his father died — alone, in his sleep. They had told him it was peaceful. But how would anyone know? No one had been there to see it. No one had held his hand or whispered goodbye.

He had left a long time ago. Not just the house — the man who lived in it.

Their last conversation had ended in shouting. “You don’t understand me,” he’d said. His father had replied, “You never tried to be understood.” And that was that. Years passed in silence, birthdays ignored, milestones left unshared. They had both waited for the other to break first.

And now, one of them was gone.

In the bedroom, he found the old wooden wardrobe — still locked. The key was under the mattress, like it always had been. He turned it slowly, unsure what he was looking for. Half expecting to feel nothing.

At the bottom, folded neatly between flannel shirts and an old cricket bat, was a notebook.

The first page simply said: “For my son — in case I run out of time.”

His throat tightened.

Page after page, his father had written. Not every day, not always clearly, but enough. Thoughts. Regrets. Fragments of memory and feeling. Moments from when he was a boy — his first fever, his fear of the dark, the day he got lost in the bazaar and how his father had carried him home. "You never remembered it, but I never forgot," one line read.

There were no apologies. Just stories. Hopes. Little things he’d noticed but never said.

"You always tried so hard to make me proud. I wish I’d told you — you already had."

Tears slipped down his face before he noticed.

In all the years of distance, he had assumed his father had hardened too. That silence meant indifference. But here was a man who hadn’t stopped watching from afar, even when the door stayed closed. A man who hadn’t known how to say “I love you” aloud, but had said it anyway — in scribbled ink, in memories only a father would carry.

That night, he didn’t leave.

He sat in the living room with the notebook on his lap, the fan humming above, just like it had when he was a boy pretending to fall asleep during thunderstorms. He read until his eyes burned, then read some more. The pages felt warm. As if his father was sitting beside him in the dim light, finally speaking.

He realized then that goodbye didn’t mean gone.

His father was still here — in the garden his hands had planted, in the crack in the kitchen tiles they never fixed, in the quiet way the wind blew through the hallway. And in every word of that notebook. He hadn’t come home to bury the past. He had come to uncover it.

And in doing so, he found something unexpected.

He still needed his father.

And somehow, even now… his father was still showing up.