When I was ten, I attended a parent-teacher conference with my mother, where my teacher complimented my prodigious mathematical ability. All I remembered was my reply that cracked a smile in my teacher: it was really all just my grandmother. After all, my grandmother has been tutoring primary school children in maths since my mother was ten, and she’s politely refused holiday trips for the purpose of being there during stressful exam periods (seriously though, in primary school?).

And lately, on nights before important tests — specifically maths extension papers – I’ve resorted to crying myself to sleep as a self-medication for exam-induced insomnia. So my mind snaps to thoughts about my grandmother, and instantly I feel my heart wince and a prickle at the edge of my tear ducts.

My grandmother and I have always been fettered by the unrelenting sprawl of the planet, separating us 2997 kilometres, but in recent years our splotch apart on the map has broadened further to approximately 5994 kilometres.

It’s difficult to distill the vicissitudes of a relationship plagued by distance, the blistering ache of perennially missing someone, the threat of dissipating memory and love, the strange morass of disconnection, into words. Yet the afflictions of loving someone metres and yards and miles apart have become the palimpsest of history — an ineluctable reality for much of humanity.

Within the planes of a 5.8 x 2.2 inch phone, our conversations traversed the boundaries of space. In my younger years, calling my grandma felt like second-nature. I relished her mellifluous, captivating laughter that roared through the screen, laced with the excitement and delight of a school-girl, with hardly any effort on my part. Anyone would attest to the wonders of a grandmother: the irreplaceable, unexplainable, idiosyncratic role she has in transposing the world’s warmth. For me, it was a deluge of feel-good comfort through a screen.

My grandmother took care of everyone in the family, and her love radiated even continents apart. She had unwavering concern and care for me, never failed to embrace me soothingly, and picked out more than half of my wardrobe in branded clothing lines I knew she scarcely treated herself with.

I remember our family trip to Bali when I was nine, with my incessant migraines and nausea and fever. To this day, I can’t tell if it was merely a convergence of childish hypochondria (I thought I had brain cancer) and mild discomforts because of the oppressive heat, or a genuine ailment.

Whatever it was, my grandmother was the one that had stayed behind. She resisted the trips to the nearby Monkey Park, to beaches, and to innumerable places, exchanging them for moments — memories that I now seal as heartbreakingly blissful — to cradle my head and stroke the hair on my head.

In the holidays, I would be my grandmother’s prized student. I remember her sheer joy and palpable pride in pitting me against her brightest, older students, watching me churn out times tables uncontested. I accompanied my grandmother to meetings with her friends clasping onto her gentle fingers, where she showed me off spryly. After which, we cackled and chortled about quirky things, like one of them being named Salmon, and the smelly chickens they owned.

But more indelibly, I remember the disappointment of failing her (not that it was that often). It happened when I couldn’t multiply four-digit numbers with three-digit numbers, when I grew irascible over having to drink her papaya-banana juice (which still terrifies me), or when my cousins and I had rancorous rifts.

My mother emphatically agreed that my grandmother’s disappointment is ingrained into her like the flaring sting of wounded, broken skin.

Lately, I’ve been wound up in the vast expanse of tests. It was right in Bali that I applied a plaster to my grandmother’s splintered fingers and she beamed, complimenting me for being a little doctor — a catalyst for my obsession with becoming a doctor. In the hazy skeins of life, I’ve entangled myself within ambition and dreams and the irresistible drive to make my grandmother proud.

Within life’s tapestry, I’ve meandered further and further into this consuming universe, caught up on organic chemistry, but not my grandmother’s latest cooking. Remarkably knowledgeable about Shakespeare’s plays, but not my grandmother’s favourite family dramas. Painfully aware of the agony of her neck arthritis, but buried under a pile of complex numbers and vectors. Even on the phone my grandmother’s physical pains have begun draining her laughter. Our disconnection from even fewer, sporadic visits tumbles and tosses in my mind – an uncomfortable, ubiquitous thought.

My grandmother also instilled in me her love of mathematics, its simple planes that can transcend the boundaries of ordinary reality, compressing truth into numbers. And it’s through her, too, that I’ve learnt to count and multiply.

I don’t know if I’ve lost sight of who she wants me to be. What I do know is that my mind has been counting. Every month, every day, every minute I’ve lost.