Today I have been thinking about what is, and what could have been. I have been thinking about choices made, and reasons why. I have been thinking about repercussions and consequences, and the price for every decision made.

There won’t be anybody to come after me; to bear my name, to be my son or daughter, to call me dad. A choice made, a choice adhered to, through thick and thin. I am not the type. I am pragmatic, selfish, stubborn, incapable. I walk and do where and what I want. I haven’t the time, the inclination, the strength, the humanity or the compassion for it. I don’t have the need.

Your joy, your striving, your investment and endeavour, your relentless belief in what you do; it would be a burden to me. I admire you for it, and those of you who do it well have my wonder and my respect. But it is not for me.

A choice made. I break the chain, a chain of lives, of histories and shared memories, of transition and transference, of continuation. Deliberately, callously, without regret.

In my mother’s home town of Botolan exists our family tree. A vast thing, each name meticulously added; cousins, mine, my brother’s, his sons and daughter, so on and so forth. Every year it is unveiled, and every year it grows, branching and splitting, name upon name inked upon it’s surface.

I will end with me. And somehow, despite the obviousness of it all, I sometimes do not know what that means.