I don’t have you here to do that anymore, so I’m going to try on my own.
I’m not sending this.I don’t think you’d want to read it right now.But I need you to know, even if it’s just ink on paper in a drawer, that I see what I did.That I see you more clearly now than I did when I had you.
The words come slowly at first, clumsy.Then they start to spill.
I write about the night at the gala.About the way, I ignored every warning sign because I was too scared to face the truth, and I let fear turn me into someone I didn’t recognize.
I don’t ask for forgiveness.
I don’t try to justify anything.
I just… lay it out.
The parts I’m ashamed of.
The parts I never wanted to look at.
When I’m done, my hand cramps, and there are tear stains on the paper.I fold the letter and put it in an old shoebox in my closet.
The next night, I write another.
About the farm, how I see her in every corner of it now, about the stupid, sharp ache in my chest when I pass the stall she likes best or the fence post she leaned on that day she told me I was more than what the world saw.
The box fills slowly.
I don’t know if she’ll ever read them.
I don’t write them for that.
I write them so that if she ever asks, “Do you understand what you did?”I can honestly say, “Yes.”And if she never asks, I’ll still know I did the work of facing myself.
The vision keeps coming back.
Tessa on her front porch, barefoot in the summer dusk, belly round under one of those soft dresses she loves, hair in a loose braid.Waiting for me.Hand on her stomach.The sun caresses her features as if it, too, knows how special she is.
I chase that dream with everything I have in me.
Every time the city noise starts to roar in my head, every time the crowd’s chant echoes in my bones too loudly, I go there.
To the porch.
To her.
To the idea that my life could be more than performance and pressure.
One night, I sit on the back step of the farmhouse with Mom, the sky wide and full of stars.She sips tea from a mug that says BEST HOCKEY MOM and wears her old cardigan with the fraying cuffs.I swear the woman runs hot.
“You’re quiet,” she says.
“I’m thinking,” I answer.
“Dangerous,” she teases gently.
I huff out a laugh.“Yeah.Seems to be.”
We sit in silence for a while, listening to the wind in the trees.
Finally, I say, “I’m tired, Mom.”
