It is precisely in these sleepless, restless nights that breathing becomes more labored, more erratic, heavier. As if the body, in the dark, remembers that something vital is missing. As if the absence nests in the lungs, and from there rises to the heart, to the mind, to the eyes that cannot close.
I realized too late how important what I had truly was. Not because I didn’t love it. But because love, when interwoven with the everyday, becomes indistinguishable from habit. You live it without shouting, you breathe it in without noticing, like air.
Then the air is gone. And panic begins. And every thought becomes a need. And every silence weighs like a boulder.
Now every gesture of love is an attempt to start again. To say “I love you” in a thousand ways, as if time could be reversed. But time doesn’t go back. Absence does. Every day. It returns. Punctual. Cruel. Final.
I’m sorry I understood it only like this. This way. So extreme. So painful. So human.
Perhaps it’s like youth. When you live it, you don’t realize how bright and unrepeatable it is. You move through it like through any other season, distracted, convinced it will last forever. And then, when it’s gone, you miss it with a biting kind of longing.
So it was with the presence of my children. It was my joyful season. And I didn’t know it. Or maybe I did, but not enough. Not like now. Now that every night stretches like winter. Now that every silence weighs more than a thousand words. Now that my love is no longer enough to keep them close.