Tender Feet

To the child, the love of my life, who will never be born from the womb of the love I will never forget: I would have been your dad, but please forgive me just the same. These tired hands have earned a living for most of my life, and they would have easily carried you to sleep on so many nights, but all that is left of the strength they now have is one that can even barely cling on to hope, a burden so heavy to bear for those who have nothing more to lose. These tired hands, rest they know not, but today until God knows when, they will be just as restless. I did what I could, and I have loved you even when you were still in my dreams, a place where you will now forever be, of which my weary eyes can only breach whenever I close them. There you will blossom on the days that will never dawn and the nights that will never follow, I never to witness you become who you would have wanted to be, you never to walk this earth with tender feet.

I tried to save myself from myself, from the monster it has been growing into, a cynic who could only see the wretched hours and days revealed as months and years of peril. I gave it my all to undo what I have slowly become, but it was too late. My heart was anchored on all the wrong places, and they took root deep where I will never be able to reach them, far beyond my grasp with what little I know. I never knew how it was to be a father, nor exactly why I desired to be one, but the thought gripped my heart as though my life depended on it, held hostage where escape never stood a chance. And in the sorry state where I dwell, made to confess by the circumstance where I find myself now, I say these things not as an excuse, but as a belated attempt to make me remember, or so that I may never forget, that once there was a man who could only love so much.

But if alibis and dreams were to count for the many times when I imagined you, I would have drifted too far and lost count, like a boat that could only depend on the stars for navigation. The happy days I have created in my mind linger like an aftertaste that was never there to begin with, and I search for them with much yearning that the more I look for them the lonelier I get, which is the same thing I would have told her, and which she probably already knows by now. These days when I walk I bow my head as if there is nothing more to look forward to, my shoulders carrying a cross nobody sees, recognized only by those who have suffered a similar fate. How many of us are left, I cannot say. But we crowd the streets where you would have walked beside me, your tiny hand holding on to mine, never having to worry about time and how cruel it can get, because where there are no memories there is nothing to remember. And so I continue to dream, until I find you there.