ROOHISM

From 2017, on his 3rd birthday:

The night before, he would start asking when I’d arrive. He kept asking every hour until I did. When I finally showed up, he wanted to sneak a peek. Shy, hiding behind walls and doors, giving me only quick glances. Almost always, I had to trick him into talking to me, pulling him closer bit by bit. It was slow and patient, but he loved it. He wanted me to catch him, to come find him, and he said yes to everything I gave him.

“I love you, Bui!”

When my 3-year-old nephew said these words, the world stopped. For a few moments, every trouble froze. For those five seconds, I was the center of his galaxy. I felt caught in his magical web, surrounded on all sides by unconditional love — love that doesn’t judge, doesn’t measure, doesn’t hold back.

The older I get, the more I wish I could go back and be three again. To love without limits, without conditions, without expectations. To push back on a world that always asks us to calculate and measure. To stay true to simply feeling a feeling.

From 2025, on his 12th birthday:

Last night, I opened one of my oldest books, Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse. My name stared back at me in old, dusty handwriting. And suddenly, on this day, I felt the desire to give him the greatest gift of all: a rusty old book. On its first page, with the smell of wood and ink pressed into it, I would write with my own hand:

Dearest of all, my little Kunnu — September 24, 2025

Sixty years from now, when he is surrounded by gadgets that answer every need yet cannot soften solitude, I hope he sits down and opens this book. I hope he travels back to when he was just twelve years old.

And in that faraway world, galaxies from here, where perhaps the 29th version of Optimus serves him tea (or a single capsule of nutrition)… where the iPhone 78 is nothing more than 23 cameras welded together… where Bitcoin has finally proven to be a major disaster and dissolved many stock portfolios… where his face looks ageless but sharper, his biomarkers perfect, all human-AI puzzles resolved — he may wander into an old wooden library built to hold his memories. He may open the book, one that still carries the same dusty smell of a worn page, and read my name.

He may remember my face. He may feel my love. But most of all, I hope he remembers my mischief — me running after him with a phone in my hand, trying to capture a video he was shy about just yesterday.

And when he does, I hope he feels my love the same way I felt his back in 2017 — without limits, without conditions, without expectations. My truest wish is that he stays loyal to what I once called it: feeling a feeling.