It’s hard to be alone with my thoughts when I walk. I almost always play music or have someone with me. It feels like things like yoga and acupuncture are good places to be emotional, to find you, but I wonder if part of that is because there are no distractions.
I do a lot of my writing while I’m driving, talking to the speech detection engine on my phone. It feels like when I allow myself time to do this thinking, I always have something to say. This is our time for conversation.
For years before you born, I used to dream about you. I told your Aunt Jessica* that these dreams were strange because you almost always looked at me with the body of an infant and eyes that were much older. And I don’t know what I imagined at the time, but today I sometimes wonder.
Sometimes I talk to you, too. It’s not as common, and it still feels more comfortable to write, even writing through speech, but sometimes I talk just for you. I tell you about my day. I tell you that I miss you.
It feels funny to say that: I miss you. It feels like there should be another word, something that acknowledges that part of what is missing is this unrealized idea.
I don’t know who you would have been. I am missing the chance to watch you grow, to discover your adult identity. I will never know the age at which you would have taken your first steps, or if you would have liked broccoli, or when you would have had your first kiss. The span of your living life is forever limited to the time that I held you inside of my body.
So I guess when I say “I miss you”, what I’m saying is so much more complicated, because it includes that time at the beginning, but it also includes what shouldn’t have had an end. I miss the fact that you were a living person. I missed the chance to see the color of your eyes. I have missed already the lifetime that you should have lived. Past, present, and future; all of this I miss.
I’m back in San Antonio to see my foster kids. It’s hard to be here without you.
Everything is hard.
I love you.
You are constantly missed.
~
* Names have been changed to protect privacy.
