The Son
He came early.
Not gently—
taken from her
under bright light,
blood everywhere.
He was yellow,
barely breathing.
They carried him away.
I stayed
and held her hand
while they returned the blood
to her body.
For a week
he lived somewhere else.
Machines.
Numbers.
People who spoke softly.
Then he came home.
I held him
as if holding
would be enough.
I gave him back only
when I had to.
He learned to walk
between us.
That seemed like proof.
Later,
a different room,
a different life.
I built the crib,
sang to him,
watched him sleep
as though this could be preserved.
I taught him things—
how to ride,
how to read,
how to sit at a table
and belong to it.
Then the illness.
Not a fever.
Not something passing.
His body turned.
There were instructions.
Measurements.
Small glass vials.
I showed him
how to fill the syringe.
How to push the needle
into himself
and live.
After that
we continued.
Holidays,
the ordinary disguises.
Pumpkins.
Wrapped gifts.
Careful substitutions.
All the while
something was breaking
that had no name.
His mother turned away.
Not to a man,
but to something larger,
harder.
A city by a salt lake.
Men who spoke
with certainty.
I was not part of that language.
There were pills for me.
They did not help.
There was a night
when they took me away.
He watched.
I remember the window.
Years passed.
I sent him there—
to the same place.
It seemed like rescue.
When he returned
it was finished.
He had other fathers now.
Men in rooms
of glass and light.
Men who had not held him
when he was small.
One day
he struck me.
Not wildly.
With purpose.
My cheek
took the shape of it.
He spoke to me
in borrowed words.
I recognized nothing.
After,
I understood something simple—
I had not been
the only one teaching him.
Years now.
On his birthday
I light a candle.
I think of the first day—
the weight of him,
the uncertainty.
I touch my face
as if to confirm
what remains.
There is still warmth there.
And something else—
a salt I did not notice then.
I sit with it.
That is what is left.
