17.

"Your absence has gone through me
like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color."
~W.S. Merwin, "Separation"

Allen would be 17 years old today.
17.
 
I was a freshman in college when he was born. I was at Tulane University in New Orleans. Melissa & Jessica(W) may remember such a fun and exciting time in my life. I wanted so badly to make the flight to North Carolina to be there with my mother and sister right when he was born. No such luck. I ended up back at home in Texas, and my luggage was in North Carolina. Nobody was at home with me. My grandparents picked me up at the airport. It was kind of a crazy time.... 

I returned to school after the weekend, and didn't get to meet him for a few more weeks. 

Allen, I first held you at DFW airport. You were so tiny and beautiful and I wanted to cry and just hold you forever. I wanted to study every tiny detail about you, right then and there. I was already in love with the very idea of who you would be. I wanted to soak you all in....to smell you and hear you and kiss you and snuggle you. 

I am so very thankful that I still have such vivid memories of that evening. It was a Friday night when I met you. What can I say? Friday seems to be my day....so many important things have happened in my life on Friday nights.... So many good things. 

I love you, and miss you, and cannot wait to see you again. I don't know what Heaven is really like. I picture everyone as having a job to do...I don't know why I envision it that way....but I just picture peace, and harmony, and unity toward a greater good. And for some reason, I picture you, Allen as some integral part of a 'welcoming committee' of sorts. Isn't that odd that my mind constructs it this way? I picture Riley on a playground. Always on a playground. I picture Masyn there too, in a perfect baby whole-ness, with angels all around. 

Sometimes, I mentally take a break from the missing-you-anger-and-grief, and find myself thinking, 'he's the lucky one.' You are now in a place where I believe there is no pain, no suffering, no burdens of sadness for you, and you're with God. Why would I possibly want anything different for you? My own selfishness. My own guilt. My own wanting of a single second to tell you that I love you, I have loved you since the moment you were born, and to pile on a million 'I'm sorries' for anything and everything I failed to say or do or give in the right moments of your life, or those moments that I took you and your presence for granted....

I just love you, and want you to know that, just one more time... We are spending another one of your birthdays without you. 
I wish it were different.


"Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated."
~Lamartine