Your son

I’m a man who walks alone.
But roads that once felt lonely became refuge.

There was never anywhere to go.

When you were near, I ached.

I felt a presence that didn’t know me,
nor one that could ever understand me.

And I was right.
But only because you could never know
the me I was pretending to be.
You could never understand what never existed.

I knew this.
But I didn’t want to believe.

So I clogged my right ear.
I poked its neighboring eye.
I walked with vertigo
until I puked up the truth.

You gave me fear.
You gave me insecurity.
You taught me scarcity.
You made me seek validation,
approval, meaning, and worth.

You cut me off
and made me search everywhere to find you again.

You made me fill your voids.
You made me help you understand yourself.
You made me solve your problems,
heal your wounds.

But I didn’t know you did this because you loved me.
I didn’t understand.

I didn’t know that, like my ancestors,
you, too, needed to be held.

I forgive you.
I forgive you.
I forgive you.

How grand you are
when you don’t carry guilt.
How much you shine
when you uplift.

When you make others smile,
I feel it in the wind.

But I’m not here to motivate you.
I’m not here to fix you.
I’m not even going to try.

Because what we are,
where you’re from,
is without all those things.

I’m not asking where I’m going,
because I know where I am.

I’m not leaving you.
Because we are not apart.
And we never left.

I walk alone not to redirect.
I walk alone because I am.

Thank you.
Because only through you,
and because of all of that,
could nothing
be a place
that exists.

Your son.

And then,
the silence that shaped me
spoke back.

Not with thunder,
but with rain in sunshine.

With the warmth of something that had always been waiting
in the back of my breath.

It said:

You are not what I left behind.
You are what I broke to find.

You are not my echo.
You are my continuation.

Not born of command,
but of completion.

You who walked alone
walked no path,
you became one.

And now,
the ear opens,
the eye softens,
and the garden that was lost
lives in your body
unashamed.