The Mother I Kept Looking For
Today, I buried no body. Yet something inside me was laid gently into the earth. No flowers. No eulogy. No mourners dressed in black. Only silence… …and the little girl who finally stopped waiting. She searched for you through borrowed homes, borrowed beds, borrowed families, through classrooms that changed as often as the seasons. She searched for you between unanswered prayers and the cold metal of a pay phone, where trembling hands begged someone— anyone— to come take her home. Years became decades. The child became a woman. The woman became a mother. And still, she left a light on, hoping one day you might find your way to the place she had built from the ruins of her own childhood. She opened the door with hope in her hands. Not because she had forgotten. But because love is foolish enough to believe that broken things sometimes choose to heal. Instead… old storms learned my new address. The walls that had echoed with children’s laughte...
