#m35mako

i. you said you’d hold a seat for me. packed between family and friends and the noise that bleeds under the table: we all are welcome here. i get to meet your siblings and you get to meet mine, and we cook dinner for a party of forty plus or minus ten. there’s screaming children around every corner.

beats the silence of forty ghosts plus two, and one crying toddler in the next room who’ll never meet you.

ii. we said we’d count the stars. buy a hole in a high rise and fill it with green (and reds, and purples, and blues). flowering in the spring, shade for the summer, pressed between pages in fall. settle in one place long enough for roots to take hold, make something from nothing.

something from nothing was the only thing i kept of it. she looks just like you.

iii. three pairs of hands, three sets of families, more kids on the way. adopt. “when the time is right.” everything planned to the second. for someone who hates writing things down, you had a plan. ten plans. all of them more beautiful than the next. grow a family, grow the family we lost, grow the family that abandoned us.

why couldn’t we stick to the plan?

iv. could be i just want to be in a life where i don’t have to forgive. ghosts don’t argue back, beg for forgiveness, fight about being right. didn’t want to be alone with myself, and it happened twice. twice. not once, and once was too much. 

we don’t keep stones for the dead, but i should’ve made an exception for you.

v. ten years to the day and she doesn’t ask anymore for stories about you. she calls me papa and that’s enough, not knowing the dreams we had for her: a family, a life, surrounded by love.