We lost my uncle Ramli Baginda on Boxing Day, December 2021. As if he had been misplaced, rather than from an unknown heart issue. Months later, the ‘I miss him’ feels less loaded. But grief is the thing with feathers, after all. Its feathered lightness rests on our shoulders, a gentle touch to remind us of his absence while I’m having a morning coffee or when I’m about to reach my phone to call him and I can’t.

Since you’ve left us, my mind has wandered from my first memory of you to my last meeting with you to our last conversation. Everything is mixed up with no timeline, and old photographs become reanimated, and even though they were taken before I was born, I’ve written myself into the narrative. I’m part historian, part niece, part voyeur as I see your life journey from a young boy in Penang to an air force technician in Singapore to a couturier in Paris. I can’t quite trust my brain, and as you fade into nostalgia, I’m placing faith in history as I try to reconstruct your story, my memory of you and the world you inhabited from photos, family, friends, letters and the poetry you left behind.

• Tags: Issue 27, Malaysia, Rowena Abdul Razak