I miss you, Papa!

​​April, with its polite sky and blooming lies, returns each year like a guest
I never invite, but always prepare for…

It walks in like it owns the place.
It hangs its coat next to my sorrow, makes itself at home and whispers,
"Remember?"

I do.
I remember everything.

How love was the only language you ever needed!
You didn’t say it much, but you brewed it, poured it into cups of tea that somehow made the world feel less heavy.

You were the warmest part of the room, even when you weren’t in it.
Your smile didn't just lit it up, but it made it feel...safe.
How you never took up space, instead just filled it with peace!
Like everything aching could rest for a while.

And your humour?
Your jokes…they were the classic dad kind.
Silly. Predictable.
The kind that made me sigh, then laugh anyway.

They don’t make people like you anymore. 
I don’t think they know how. 
You were proof enough that goodness can still be quiet.

If grief were a book, April would be the heaviest page.
Folded in the corner. Tear-stained. 
Unreadable some days, unskippable on others.
 
Do you know...? 
I don’t drink tea anymore, not in a way I once did anyway.
Not because I stopped liking it, but because no one makes it like you.
Somehow, every cup now tastes like absence.
Like a hug that stops halfway through because it remembers you're gone.

Tell me...
Are you okay?
Is the sky as soft as they say?
Do you miss me the way I miss you...with the kind of ache that sits behind the eyes, burns behind the ribs, waits in the quiet like silence before a scream.

Do you watch me when I crumble in mid-conversations, because an old song slipped through the speaker, and reminded me of you?

Because here...every April, I lose you all over again.
It's not like the first time;  not like a sharp, sudden ending, but like a story I know by heart that still breaks me in the retelling.

- Neha Sharma