When I think of my father, I always think of cigars—the smell of it. You don’t need to see one to know it’s burning. Unlike your cheap standard cigarettes, whose odor is sharp and chemical, leaving a lingering staleness of burnt paper, its aroma was rich and earthy, with undertones of what I have come to understand as I’ve aged to be leather and chocolate. Its thick smoke hugged and danced circles around me, coating the room like an old-world perfume. Curious of the myriad of smells this stick was producing, I unwrapped one, quickly recognizing the…

Sometimes I wish I could have unwrapped what was going on inside my father’s head. Though, like the cigar, I feel its complexity would have been incomprehensible for me then——perhaps even now.

• The burning cigar like a clock ticking down

• Following the trail of ashes to the truth.

• Now I think of the urn that holds his ashes? Osenko? (Smoke)尚香壺

My father used to say, “We are our choices.” Every seemingly innocuous decision is a chisel carving, shaping us into who we are, who we will become. We all have our rough edges, including my father, who had a longer relationship with cigars than he did with my mother, and flirting with the devil’s nectar more than he should. He had never laid a finger on me other than to comb his hands through my bushy hair, or when we wrestled.

The first time we wrestled was when I turned eight. What matters is I lost. Every time. From what I can remember, my father wasn’t a big man. What he lacked in muscle and size he made up for with brains. Even when I played dirty and took a hard yank of his arm hair, he would just laugh and throw me down. I loved that laugh. We would wrestle for hours, usually calling it quits once I started crying. I hated to lose. He always told me not to cry—that men don’t cry. The only thing worse than losing to him, was finding out I would never get the chance to beat him. Because one day, he just... disappeared, like a puff of smoke. And that’s when the real wrestling started.

The Whodunit Diaries