The last time I saw Eira she was five and a half. She stood at the door in her school coat and she was explaining something, with the particular authority that five-year-olds bring to explanations. I don't remember exactly what it was. Something about a snail. Something about why snails carry their houses and what happens if they put the house down, and whether the house remembers the snail if the snail goes away.
I remember the coat. Navy blue. A button missing on the left cuff.
That is what you get, when you leave too soon: fragments. And then years where the fragments are all you have, so you hold them carefully, you turn them over, you know them by heart the way you know things that cannot be replaced.
The Years Between
Children continue without you. This is obvious when you say it and it is not obvious at all when you live it.
Somewhere in those years, Eira started secondary school, and then finished it. She had a first day at university, which she got through the way most people get through first days, with a combination of nerve and performance and the quiet terror of not yet knowing who you will become in this new place. She made friends. She studied. She graduated this year.
I know all of this not from watching it but from being told it, over coffee, by a twenty-two-year-old who sat across a table from me and caught me up on seventeen years in the course of an afternoon.
There is no good way to describe what that afternoon was. I had been afraid of it for weeks beforehand. Not afraid that it would be bad, exactly, but afraid of the particular arithmetic of it, the years on one side and the table between us on the other and the question of whether any of it would add up to something real.
What She Carries
Eira was Tima's best friend.
At two and a half, Tima did not have many best friends. She had Eira and she had Hoppy and she had the clear and unshakeable sense that these two things were the most important things. Eira was three years older, which at that age is a significant gap, a whole developmental geography between them, and yet they had worked something out between them that defied the difference. What Eira said, Tima learned. What Tima learned, Tima used.
I watched this happen. I was there for the transmission. I saw Eira teach Tima the word "special" as a defence against all arguments, the way you deploy a trump card, and I watched Tima deploy it that same evening with the perfect confidence of a student who has already surpassed the lesson.
Nobody else saw that. Or almost nobody. The people who were there are fewer now.
Eira was there. Eira saw it. And Eira has carried it, for seventeen years, in the way that children carry things they witnessed before they had words for what they were witnessing. She didn't carry it as a conscious archive. She carried it the way we all carry the things that formed us, not on the surface but underneath, in the posture and the instinct and the particular quality of her attention when she talks about those years.
Twenty-Two
She is twenty-three now. She was twenty-two when we found each other again.
There is a quality to a twenty-two-year-old that is hard to articulate without sounding either patronising or too fond. They are fully formed and still forming. They carry their history and are not yet entirely sure what to do with it. The particular version of Eira at twenty-two was someone who had arrived at adulthood with her own character intact and her own grief folded in among everything else, and who sat across a table from me and spoke about Tima the way you speak about someone who is still real to you, not a story you have been told but a person you knew with your own hands and your own memory.
That mattered more than I can say.
What Remains
In Welsh, the word cofio means both to remember and to call to mind. The distinction is in the direction of it. Cofio is an active thing. You do not merely possess the memory; you reach for it, you call the person back into the room.
Eira does this. She does it in the specific way that only the people who were actually there can do it. She calls Tima back into the room not as I do, not through a father's grief and a father's particular slant of memory, but as a five-year-old who loved her calls her back. That is a different kind of calling. It brings a different Tima. It brings the Tima who had a best friend, who learned words from her, who taught her things in return that I don't even know.
The coat. The button. The snail.
In those years when I was away, when the fragments were all I had, there was also Eira somewhere, carrying her own fragments, growing up around them. I did not know this was happening. I could not watch it happen.
But she kept the fragments. And she brought them back. And in some way that I had not expected and could not have planned for, finding her again at twenty-two was the closest thing I have to having some of those years back.
She was mine too, in all the ways that count. She still is.