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
Mari Sánchez Cayuso 