What I Didn't Expect to Lose Twice
I made peace, a long time ago,
with being given away.
I understood — or tried to —
the desperation, the timing, the impossible math
of being young and unable
and doing the only thing that felt like love
at the time.
That grief I carried gently.
I built a life around it
the way you build a house
around a tree you can't bring yourself to cut down.
But I wasn't ready
for the second loss.
I came back as a grown woman,
not asking to be raised,
not asking for anything undone —
just asking to be seen.
Just wanting to stand in a room
and say I'm here, I made it,
I turned out okay, I just wanted you to know.
I didn't expect an apology.
I didn't need forgiveness for existing.
I only expected —
I don't even know what I expected.
Maybe just a version of relief.
Maybe just a door held open
even an inch.
Instead I found the same absence,
grown up alongside me,
waiting on the other side of the door
in the shape of a person
who still couldn't look at what they'd made.
I keep turning it over,
searching for the part I'm missing.
What is it in me
that a grown adult, all these years later,
with nothing left to lose,
still couldn't reach for?
I am not angry about the beginning.
I understand the beginning.
It's this part I can't make sense of —
the part where I showed up whole,
unafraid, unresentful,
just a woman looking for her own face
in someone else's,
and still walked away
holding the same emptiness
I carried in at seventeen,
at twenty-seven,
at every age I let myself hope.
I don't have an answer for this kind of hurt.
It doesn't behave like other grief.
It doesn't fade with time —
it just learns to sit quietly
in a corner of me,
asking, every so often,
in a voice I can't quite silence:
what was it about me
that made staying away
easier than staying?
I don't know if I'll ever get to ask them.
So I'm asking it here instead —
not for an answer,
but because some questions
deserve to be spoken,
even when no one
is left to answer them.