March 21, 2017

when I saw their faces and it felt like home

And I wasn't thinking how I could win them over with that banana bread
or how to move out of the way when they heave through the house
with a bad mood or some unarticulated disappointment. It didn't
occur to me, not once in the 20 minutes of our transatlantic video call,
I hadn't nursed them through their childhood fevers, or talked to them
about sex, or taken the raucous trip to Disney, or given them my hand
to cross the street on their first day of school. Instead, I yielded to the faces
on the screen, the present tense of it all - their happy jostling, the voice
of their mother behind them making dinner I would not eat but could still taste
halfway around the world.