:: Edge of Infinity ::

And so it goes again. Father Time throws on a switch and the new year clicks into place. Like children playing Blindman's Bluff we are stumbling - arms outstretched - onto the edge of infinity, laughing nervously as we try not to trip, to fall, to fail. I welcome my year-end nostalgia, but I embrace the stirring beat of (dare I say it) hope as 2005 dawns with the untouched perfection of a newborn.

Mine would have been six.

But the time for real regrets has passed; the ensuing years of remorse are really nothing more than deafening reverberations, bore of guilt and self-infliction. I cannot undo. I can only make peace. I'm not any wiser, but I'm not blind to the circumspect that life is more or less a choice of choice. C'est la vie, I say again, but not with the same gray nihilism that I once wore like a second skin of little meaning.

***

Sunday afternoon. The rain was raging, a cloudburst of mirthless strength. But I was warmed by my mother's laughter, sounding through the house, and the chatter of my sisters as they got their books ready for the new school year.

My father sat quietly reading, and I felt a monsterous pang as he gingerly picked up my sister's secondary-one Chinese textbook and muttered, almost to himself, "I used to teach this." He caught me staring at him - my face must have been an opened book of shadows and sadness - and he promptly dropped the book, returning to the safe, sullen world of his newspaper.

I looked away as well: my father's wasted talent gnaws at me like acid, and it's a pain I can't talk to anyone about. I'm not ashamed of his choice. I'm only distressed because he could have been so much more, if he had been one of those people who can see victory in failure, instead of the mere triumphant of safety.

***

I passed from one year to the next in wakeful stupor, with laughter, and with an immense gratitude for what life didn't deny me. I couldn't greet 2005 without a certain pang of loss, but I knew that despite all of its disenchantments, life is still brisk with the canticle of possible joys. It's a dissonant knowledge that comforts, even if I know there will be days when my own demons will spit on it and call it false. For now, it's there, it's blithe and brilliant, and it's enough.