If only you could see the truth I see here, sitting so quietly behind your eyes. Christmas lights shredded to dark tracers in the refracted light of your pupils. I see your entire life stretched out in front of me. Smiles, tears, and bafflement. It’s all so real. I can see your love grow, peter off to dim appreciation, harden into exploitation, and then melt and solidify into something else entirely.
I can see you smile, walking down sun-soaked isles among friends you won’t meet for a decade, each living their own tragic comedies before they entwine their’s with yours. I can see you here, in this head-space, staring at some far flung future and looking out further still and…I wonder if it will be filled with quiet smiles? A string of contempt? It’s impossible to know. And in the end, it won’t matter. You will grow, you will love, and you will move on because you are my daughter, not my slave.
I am here to guard you, protect you until you can take the reins already waiting for you, and like all great protectors, I must be forgotten so that you can grow into your own skin.
And then you’ll be off. Skittering among trees, among dreams, among times that sit so far off as to be relegated to a simple number. And you will forget as you make a family of your own. Slowly at first, and then faster. These moments that have yet to happen, the love I have yet to show you, the bad jokes I must inflict upon you…There so very far ahead of us, but even now I can’t help but look past them.
It keeps me honest, appreciative maybe. Perhaps to the point of excess. There is never enough time to love something so pure, so genetically predisposed to your sympathy.
I feel it, the train that is your very existence pulling away from the station. It’s a marvelous thing. A horrifying thing. I’ll follow you, wishing it was forever, knowing someday my train will slow, stutter, and drift into relic. I wonder if you’ll still smile when you fart. I wonder if you’ll still be able to lose yourself in the simple pleasure of color and shape forever. Moreover, I suppose, I wonder if you’ll ever stop trying to put your damn fingers in your mouth.
A Land of Rum and Writing 