Grief was heavy precisely because it was so weightless.

Its weightlessness and shapelessness allowed it to just tag along and bleed on everything else, and that made everything else heavy. Taste of food – any kind of food – that seemed to get bland, air that seemed to just sit on one's chest, pressing it like a thousand-tonnes weight, making the act of breathing truly a chore.

There was something about grief that made it obvious like a hanging, thick, towering grey cloud in the middle of a room, yet so elusive that it simply could not be described properly in words. When one tried to describe it, it always felt like there were these black holes that could not be filled, explained, because the correct vocabulary simply did not exist.

Grief was like a grey cloud that was obviously there, but noone could touch it, explain it, let alone do away with it.

Not a drop of tears was shed, the weeping all happened within, away from sympathetic, peering eyes and the "you will be okay" statement.

Maybe it was better that way – if grieving happened in the privacy of one's own mind and heart then one did not need to explain it to the world out there. That was a relief when grief itself was so impossibly difficult to explain.

Grief became somewhat a nuisance when a seemingly random object, insignificant, small, may possibly lead the world to come to a screeching halt – a pendant, a hairclip, an old dusty wallet, whatever it was that had once belonged to the one who had left – one glimpse at it and the grieving seemed to start all over again, fresh, stubborn, and stinging like hell.

For Airin, it was a round jade pendant attached to a silver necklace that used to belong to Mom.

She woke up that morning, opened her eyes, pulled her blanket closer to her chin as the cool weather of late autumn got to her. She turned her head, and there it was. The necklace curled limp on her nightstand.

Her heart skipped a beat. She closed her eyes, turned her head the other way, and her tears, fresh and warm, glided uncontrollably down her cheek.

A barrage of memory came back into her consciousness, an onslaught of what she had wanted to forget but failed.

That day last year, Mom handed her the necklace."It's for you. It has been owned by the women in my family for generations. My mom got it from her mom, and her mom from her mom. My mom gave it to me on my seventeenth birthday. It always reminds me of her. Take it, sweetie. It'll look good on you!"

"Are you sure, Mom?" she hesitantly took the necklace though she knew she had failed to hide the excitement on her face or her voice.

Airin had loved that necklace since she was a little girl watching her mom, with that necklace around her neck, doing chores around the house.

Its festive green color glistened in the morning light as she prepared toasts for breakfast, it reflected the last glimmer of light from the sunset when she washed dinner plates and Airin stood next to her drying the just-washed plates.

Mom always wore it, and it did look fabulous on her, she looked like an angel with the glistening pendant following her everywhere.

Mom took her shoulders, shook it gently, and nodded. "I am very, very, sure. Remember me when you wear it, and take care of it well. Ok?"

She nodded a few solid nods, and caressed the jade necklace with great care.

"Jade protects you from evil spirit, and brings calmness and healing. You are half Chinese from my side, you should know this too."

Airin just nodded mindlessly, her attention was fully on the jade pendant. It was hers now.

Mom died two days after that. She was doing her usual morning walk around the neigbourhood when a teenage driver, with no driver licence, drunk from a night of heavy partying, lost control of his steering wheel, and slammed his car on her.

She was thrown meters away, the paramedics managed to revive her, put her in a trauma helicopter, and doctors tried valiantly to save her, all kinds of tubes, beeping machine were attached to her body as she laid limp on the ICU bed for four hours before they gave up, stating "massive hemorrhage and multiple system failures" as the cause of death and just like that, her mom was gone. Just like that.

Mom. The one she would tell all her teenage crushes and heartbreaks and the first person on this earth who heard about her first period, whose lavender-scented embrace calmed her down as she sobbed because the sight of bright red blood droplets on her underwear made her faint and thought she was going to die.

Mom who believed in her, that she could be a good preschool teacher, like what she did now.

Mom who stood between her and Dad. Dad who wanted her to be in the bistro business with him. Dad, the chef, who wanted nothing but his bistro to earn at least a Michelin star, it did not matter what Airin wanted.

Sudden death like what had happened to Mom was brutal in that you woke up one morning, all was fine, life went on as if nothing could shake its foundation, then by the end of the day it went upside down, inside out, blown apart.

No goodbyes, no closure, like a journey that was cut short because the road just ... ended. Without warning.

Her smartphone vibrated from its charging station on her nightstand, next to Mom's necklace.

Airin sighed, wiped her tears, and grabbed the phone.

A video call.

She took a deep breath, wiped her cheek one more time, and pressed the Accept button.

A middle-aged man with a shock of thick wavy brown hair, gelled and combed smoothly to the left appeared on the screen. His glasses hung on the bridge of his nose, his round meaty face red from sweat and heat from his morning rounds in the wet market, and the piercing dark eyes stared straight at her.

"Airin! You can help me tonight, right?" the voice of Herbert Wellgrove, her dad. Raspy from years of smoking, impatient, loud.

Airin froze for a brief second as her brain crawled to piece together what her dad was talking about.

Today. Friday. Waitressing after work. Bistro.

She nodded hard. "Yes, I will be there, Dad!"

"Don't be late!" and that was it. The screen went dark when Dad ended the call. No bye, no have a good day, no I love you ...

Airin let out a sigh. She was never, ever, late to any appointment she had with Dad.

Dad. The one parent she had now. The one she had been trying to figure out all these years. The one who she wanted to make proud but seemed like she had failed again and again.

Preschool teacher, her job, never made it to her dad's list of dream jobs for his only child.

"She would so love being a teacher, Herb. She would make a great teacher. She loves young children," her mom stammered as Airin eavesdropped that night after she had a fight with her dad about what her next step should be after high school.

She had prepared a folder with all the application procedures, scholarship possibilities to three-four different universities and teacher's colleges around here, the ones she meticulously chose so she could still come back home on the weekend to help her dad in his bistro.

Her folder ended up on the floor with all its contents flew out and about, covering the carpet with sheets of papers and brochures, while Airin was chased out of the dining room to "think." She was not sure what she did after she stormed off the room, she cried maybe, or just froze in anger and disbelief.

"How much could she earn? A teacher, Lynn! I have a bustling bistro that could really use her help! She should do business administration! Or finance! Accounting! Tax law! I don't care! But not teacher!"

"Herb! It's her life!" her mom was shaking. Her mom was petite and timid, but always managed to scrape enough strength to stand up for her in front of Dad. Her slightly hunched bony back always seemed straighter, her eyes looked up straight to Dad instead of focusing low on his toes, and her voice louder than her normal soft-spoken, with a hint of tremble, whenever she spoke to Dad.

But Mom was gone. Last year, actually almost exactly a month after she got her first fulltime job as a preschool teacher. In her grief, she used to think it was so unfair now she was alone fending off Dad and his ambition for her. Now nobody stood between her and Dad. Nobody reminded her to calm down when her voice started to rise up to match Dad. Nobody.

As months went by, she decided maybe it was best that way. Mom needed her break after 27 years of marriage to a walking, ticking, timebomb like Dad. The one whose sole purpose in life was to get a Michelin star, grew his restaurant business, and hopefully landed a spot at primetime tv in one of those fancy cooking shows. The one who scream seemed to be his preferred mode of communication or else people would not give him much respect.

Helping out every Friday and weekend at the bistro seemed like Dad's way of getting her to pay back some of the college tuition that he grudgingly helped her pay.

To be a teacher. Dad still thought that was an epic waste of money. She worked her ass off for years as college health clinic lab assistant so she never really asked for pocket money anymore from Dad, but college tuition, even with her scholarship, was something she still needed a bit of help with.

Loud rumbling from outside her bedroom window startled her. The metro train passed by. It was just like an angry monster that came gurgling, charging from far away to her direction, it got louder as it got closer.

She had lived in this tiny one-bedroom apartment for six months now, but she never seemed to get used to the fact that its rent was cheap because it was located next to the city metro train railway.

Her apartment was in the third floor, and the railway was pretty much next to her bedroom bay windows, the one right at the head of her bed, as it was one of those flyover metro railway where it was built meters higher than the traffic down there. She did not care at that time. She just wanted to get away from Dad.