45 Days

My youngest wrote me a letter

Forty-five days ago
and I cannot stop thinking about the fact
that his love had already been traveling toward me
while I was still living ordinary life unaware of it

Forty-five days

Forty-five mornings I woke up not knowing
a piece of him already existed in the world
trying to find its way back to me

Do you understand how devastating that is?

That while I was awake or asleep
his handwriting was somewhere moving through darkness

sealed inside trucks
resting in forgotten bins
crossing highways at night beneath exhausted stars

all because my son sat down one day
and missed me enough
to let his hand speak

And suddenly modern life feels so empty to me

These instant little messages we fire at each other all day
without breath in them
without weight
without silence

But a letter

a letter suffers distance

It earns arrival

For forty-five days
the page carried his touch without mine

The same hand I once held crossing parking lots
The same hand that learned how to write its own name
while I stood nearby believing time moved slowly

God
I did not just read his words

I felt time itself collapse

And there he was again somehow
inside the pressure of certain letters

Forty-five days old already

By the time I touched the page
he had already changed a little

Laughed at things I did not hear
Walked through evenings I did not see
Carried worries silently without me beside him

That is motherhood perhaps . .

the lifelong ache
of realizing your children continue becoming people
in rooms you cannot enter

Still

when I saw the word “Mom” written there
in the same familiar slant he has carried since boyhood

something inside me broke open so quietly
I almost mistook it for peace

Because after all the years
all the growing
all the distance
all the necessary separations life demands from us

some part of him
still writes home
like I am the safest thing he has ever known