When I first opened my eyes
I was not entirely awake
Nor entirely asleep
I still do not know
which side of consciousness
I occupied
Only that he was there
My father
Or the memory of him
Or whatever remains of love
after the body has gone
I saw him
Or perhaps I felt him first
The unmistakable scent
of a freshly ironed shirt
Cotton
Starch
Warmth
The fragrance of a man
who believed appearances mattered
who pressed his collars carefully
who stepped into the world
with dignity buttoned to his throat
And then
something happened
that language still struggles to hold
I felt his love
Not remembered love
Present love
The kind that exists
when a child collapses into a parent’s arms
and discovers
that fear cannot follow them there
I could not see his face
Every time I tried
the light became unbearable
Not painful
Just impossibly bright
I would lift my eyes
and immediately close them again
Overcome
Not by fear
By radiance
As though love itself
had become too luminous
for ordinary sight
So I stopped trying to see
And instead
I rested against him
Against the crisp cotton
of his freshly ironed shirt
Against the familiar scent
of starch
and home
I buried my face there
the way children do
when they have cried enough
And suddenly
there was no grief
No loneliness
No years
No death
Only peace
The kind that asks for nothing
The kind that explains nothing
The kind that simply wraps itself
around a wounded heart
and says:
rest now
I do not know
if I dreamed him
I do not know
if the mind
hungry for comfort
created the moment itself
I only know
that when I woke
the feeling remained
The warmth remained
The certainty remained
And for one impossible instant
the distance between the living
and the dead
felt no thicker
than a bedsheet
lifting in morning light
I never saw his face
But somehow
that is not what stayed with me
What stayed
was the embrace
The starch on his shirt
The scent of being loved
The overwhelming brightness
And the strange understanding
that after all these years
what I missed most
was not my father’s face
It was the feeling
of being his daughter
Mari Sánchez Cayuso 