Born and raised in Sunyshore, my grandfather began working when he was ten years-old and purchased a house near the beach at eighteen (mind you this was before the economy stagnated). He met my grandmother during the eve of war. When the war officially ended on paper, he returned home to find that illness had claimed her young life.

He refused to remarry ever since.

I visit my grandfather on the weekends. His small dining room smells of freshly-strained coffee and tobacco. Apart from the large bookcase stocked with outdated refrigerator manuals and the few nautical objects I am unable to identify, there is scarcely any other decoration. A lonely charcoal-burning stove and table draped in a frangipani-print cloth, surrounded by old armchairs of faded fabric, are the only luxuries he allowed himself.

When my grandfather returns from his smoke break, he notices me in the dining room and acknowledges me with a small furrow of the brow. He has more hair in each eyebrow than I have on my entire head.

"Why are you wearing a coat when the thermometers are melting outside?" he says.

"I forgot."

"Roll up your sleeves."

"Why?"

Ignoring my protests, he easily wrestles away my coat—and gives a cry of alarm.

"Who hit you?"

"No one. I fell." My peers.

"Are those burns?"

"I fell on the ironing machine." Rotom's antics.

"Why is there dried blood on your neck?"

"The ironing board fell on me." Lately the wild Zubat has lost interest in the blood coursing through my wrists, fixating on the delicacy running through my carotid arteries instead. I need to be more discrete with post-feed cleaning.

"Look at me when I'm talking to you!"

My grandfather wields an authoritarian voice that has never known patience—or was never given the chance to nurture it. The suit he wears might very well be the same suit as the day he retired. If retirement guaranteed peace of mind and an easy conscience, my grandfather had long missed that telegram.

Most of my conversations with him feel like an interrogation.

"Does my daughter…?"

"I'm fine. Promise." There is no point in inconveniencing them when all flesh wounds will heal someday. With the aid of my magic medicine, of course.

My grandfather's eyes burn with indignation, but he makes no further comment. Whenever my parents are brought up, his lips are suddenly sealed by a mysterious force.

I opt for safer waters. "You shouldn't keep smoking. I read in the newspaper that cigarettes cause lung cancer."

"And banks around the world are deeply committed to eradicating poverty," is his dry response. "Better than going out with a tumor in my brain."

The mere thought of my outliving him terrifies me. "I don't want you to die! Please don't talk like that…"

My sudden outburst breaks the hardness in his eyes. He lays a calloused hand on my head, his skin smelling vaguely of death, and searches for the right words to comfort a panicked child.

"Do you want pudding?"

Wobbling under a deluge of pale caramel and smelling of stale vanilla powder, the anemic custard pudding all but disappears under my greedy hands. As the processed sugar slowly, inexorably poisons my pancreas, my grandfather fills in the silence with the subject he knows best.

"The human brain matures in the late stages of adulthood. But as soon as children turn eighteen, they are given guns and shipped off to die for a cause not of their own. A young man makes the perfect soldier. Why? Because he has great potential for aggression and mental illness, making him the perfect living weapon to conquer his neighbors…"

Sighing despondently, he lights up a cigarette in the house. The smoke burns my lungs, but I believe that if he doesn't numb his weary soul with nicotine, he will crumble under the horrors of what he had witnessed on the battlefield.

Sometimes I am tempted to ask whether he had killed. I never build up the courage to do so. I don't want to remember my grandfather as a murderer even if he was acting on orders.

"What is war? " he continues. "It's a blood sport where bright, promising futures are slaughtered for the greater glory and profit margins of business conglomerates and oligarchs—among our other founding fathers—in the name of honor, the empire, the flag…"

When he embraces his acquired pessimism, it is best to let him go off.

Alas, cigarette extinguished, he no longer has the courage to reminisce and quickly shifts the conversation to me. My grandfather believes that, since children my age are living in a time of peace, we are entitled to whittling away our days watching the world go by until the world turns around and starts watching us.

"What is your dream?" he says.

My answer is a line practiced and rehearsed. "I'm going to head my father's company."

"No! What do you want to do?"

The severity in his voice makes it clear that I have upset him. Reading the fear in my trembling chin, he lowers his gaze bitterly in lieu of an apology that will never leave his lips.

"I'm sorry," I say for the both of us.

Deep in my heart, I am scared of my grandfather, of the possibility that he will mistake me for a malevolent phantom of the past. Yet I sense that behind his fortress of stoicism is a man wallowing in defeat and tiredness, forever haunted by the shock of his love's absence.

Timidly clasping my hands over his, I pretend not to notice them trembling under my touch. I will not abandon him. We are family, after all. Family will always be there for each other.

"Tell me about my grandmother," I say.

At the mention of her memory, my grandfather has the tendency to smile the way some people do when they are trying to hold back tears. He pulls out an old photograph, the one he likes to carries like a guarded secret and which he often gazes at for long spells. His sweetheart may be gone, but her presence lingers in every corner of their home.

"She was the only woman I had ever loved," he says in a whisper.