The Heart of a Child

I am bound to you the way a child is bound to his mother— before language, before reason, before the world teaches him that even warmth can leave.

There is something ancient in it, something helpless.

A small hand closed around a finger, believing with all its little strength that holding on is enough to keep someone from disappearing.

That is how my heart holds you.

Foolishly. Tenderly. With the terrible faith of something too innocent to understand goodbye.

My mind knows better.

It knows that people leave. That love can arrive with nowhere to live. That some souls find each other only to become ghosts in one another’s lives.

But the child in me does not understand such things.

He only knows that you felt like shelter.

That somewhere beneath your voice the noise in him went quiet.

That when you looked at him, he did not feel abandoned by the world.

And now you are gone, and he is learning absence the cruelest way a child can—

by reaching.

Reaching into empty rooms. Reaching through old conversations. Reaching for the warmth that memory keeps pretending is still there.

I tell him to let go.

He only grips tighter.

I tell him you were never his to keep.

He looks at me with those unbearable eyes and asks why something that felt so much like home was built with a door.

I have no answer.

So every night I carry him back from the threshold, his small heart kicking inside my ribs, calling your name like a child waking from a nightmare and crying for the one person who is no longer coming.

And perhaps that is what you left me with—

not a broken heart,

but a frightened child living inside the ruins of a man, still listening for your footsteps,

still believing the door will open,

still too young to understand

that some people become home only long enough to teach you what homelessness feels like.