A year and a bit on from my father's death, I sometimes think of him as someone I used to know.

It's a thought I don't like to entertain. We prefer to think of them as here, in some way. Wherever you move, so too does the spirit of the ones we have lost. Of course this is true, because they exist in our memory. At times I recall his feet tapping in the air to music, or his hands drawing mud maps of gardens and architecture or swapping the lens on his camera. They are fleeting, hapless things. There's an irony as the spell check turns 'fleeting' to 'deleting' - my brain will rid some memory to make way for new, and eventually my father will become like digital rot, and then gone, erased from the hard drives of everyone that knew him.

This thought comes to me most when I'm driving down long and open stretches of road. It's like a rope tugging him backwards and me forwards so that the tangled cord in between becomes frayed and ready to snap. The more I move into the future, the less of the same space we occupy. I can't tug on the rope because I know it's futile, and that I'll be forcing some version of him that isn't real.

When once I missed him so much it ached, the pain of loss stretching into sharp days, now the loss is dull, soft, shorter lived. Unless I'm with people who bring him vividly to life - mother, mainly - the thoughts of him rise and pop, and disappear quickly, painlessly. He is someone I used to know, a father I used to have.

But then, he is present suddenly. Enjoying a sweet and juicy red apple yesterday, just like he did, almost every day of his life, I ate the whole thing, core and all, the marzipan taste of the pips tugging at the rope.