My Father’s Silence

ゆうぐれに
けむりがゆれる
ちちのかげ

yūgure ni / kemuri ga yureru / chichi no kage
in the dusk / the smoke sways / my father’s shadow

My father is a quiet man.
Not the kind of quiet that feels cold or distant,
but the kind that comes from a lifetime of watching before speaking.
He inherited that silence—from his parents, from the land he grew up on,
from a culture that believed words should be earned, not spilled.

Part of it, I think, is in his genes.
The way he can sit for hours fixing something small,
a broken lock, a chair, the hinge of a door—
as if time itself waits for him to finish.
And part of it is habit, carved into him by years of repetition.
Patience, precision, quiet hands.

He smokes. Always has.
The smell of tobacco still feels like home in a strange way—
that soft blend of fire and calm.
He used to drink too, back when the world seemed heavier.
There was a certain sadness to it,
an attempt to burn away the silence from the inside out.
I watched him do it for years.
And though I didn’t inherit the bottle, I inherited the itch—
that restless need to fill the empty spaces.
Only, I learned to pour it into other things.
Writing. Moving. Fixing what’s broken before it breaks me.

I learned a lot from him.
How to fix what can be fixed,
and how to wait when it can’t.
He taught me how to take things apart carefully,
so they’d still remember how to come back together.
He taught me to measure twice,
to listen before speaking,
to let things unfold at their own pace.

But I also learned from his mistakes.
From the nights when silence turned too heavy,
when the room filled with smoke and regret,
when distance became easier than tenderness.
Those moments taught me what not to repeat—
how to speak before it’s too late,
how to sit in the same room with someone you love and still feel close.

He never told me how to live.
He just lived—and let me watch.
Sometimes I wish he’d said more,
but then again, his lessons came through differently.
Through pauses, through gestures, through small repairs.
He taught me what strength looks like when it’s quiet.
What dignity feels like when no one’s watching.

And yet, because of him, I also learned to laugh.
His humor is subtle, almost accidental.
A single raised eyebrow, a perfectly timed sigh,
a joke delivered without changing expression.
It’s the kind of laughter that slips through cracks—small but healing.

And I’ve cried because of him, too.
Not out of anger, not even sadness—
but because I could finally see how deeply human he was.
How much love hides behind restraint.
How much fear hides inside pride.
How much silence can carry if you let it.

Now, as I get older, I recognize more of him in me.
The quietness. The stubbornness. The need to fix things instead of talk about them.
But also, the capacity to change.
To let the silence soften into something that connects rather than isolates.
To learn patience without paralysis.

When I visit him, he still smokes by the window.
The ashtray fills with tiny gray mountains.
He doesn’t say much, and I don’t push it.
We just sit there, the air between us filled with faint smoke and old understanding.
Sometimes he tells a story from decades ago,
something I’ve never heard before.
Sometimes we just sit in shared quiet,
and I realize that maybe this is what love looks like in his language—
steady, wordless, warm in its own way.

He gave me more than I ever knew.
A blueprint of strength and silence,
a map of mistakes and redemption,
and the permission to feel everything—
even what he never learned how to say.

I learned to laugh and to cry because of him.
And both, I think, are just different ways of saying thank you.