I sit here and try hard to continue my work assignment, but the memories keep coming and all of a sudden I’m caught in the nostalgia. I give up the assignment and begin to type.

I’m not sad, at least not in the literal sense, but as I sit and type, I’m just numb by the fact I that I’ve never even considered him or his death. Isn’t it weird that we never considered the people who play a big role behind the curtain? The people, if not for whom, a lot of things we did, wouldn’t have been possible.

I was 10 when I first met David and 17 or 18 when he left our employment last year. Our previous driver had been a crook and everyone was relieved to get David. He was from the old school; principled, neat, respectable and he was the former chauffeur of my parents’ previous boss. He was safe, trustworthy and known.

Over those 7-8 years, through my colorful adolescence, he drove me through three different schools, a countless number of music lessons, swimming lessons and tuition classes. He chose to keep shut when I fought with my mum in the back seat or cried after my OL maths paper, he chose to ignore when a pack of us, girls would get into the car and chat incessantly and he chose to not tell when I went shopping for my, then high school love, after school.He knew everywhere I went. Every house of my friends, be it old or new. He every shop I went to, every place I went to. He just drove. Wherever we told him to.

I’m now numb with the realization that he knew so much, but never told. Not because I ever told him to, but out of respect. That was his way, he needn’t be told.

He retired, sometime last year, finally giving in to my father’s rants about how he is not fit anymore for driving,yet then, he stayed until I finished my holidays.

He drove me for the last time on my 19th birthday last year. He was no more an employee, but had just happened to visit on that day and felt bad that I was sulking due to the absence of our current driver.I met him, less than a month ago when he visited us with rambutan and the his customary ‘halapa’. He went into cardiac arrest whilst we were on holiday in Thailand, around two weeks ago and my father told me of his death, on Saturday, I knew. I had expected it.

Visiting his home on Monday evening, I’m shocked by the distance he travelled everyday and am silently ashamed when I remember how annoyed I used to be when he would get half an hour late.

So here I am, trying to pay homage to a man, if not for whom my adolescence would have been very different, with a few disjointed sentences and a countless number of memories. To a man, I never thought would be dead, I have no regrets,but as the memories start flooding in and my thoughts go into a whirlpool, in this solitude, my eyes start to mist , as I grip the fact the never will I see him ever again .