Firstborn

I miss my boy. I miss his smile and his laugh. I miss our chess games. I miss his strong, sturdy body, and his solid hugs. There are things I want to tell him and to ask him; and now he cannot listen, and he cannot answer.

I want to rediscover what it means to live with purpose, to live with hope, to live with certainty. I remember a man named Mark, who used to live and behave as though all those things existed, and were real. I wonder sometimes where he has gone, what he is doing, and where he is going.

I recall him as a person of good humor and positive perspective. A man who believed in romantic love and the fealty of friends. It was as though he inhabited a world of his own making and his own choosing.

But worlds wink in and out of existence, and when they collide they result in a universe of changes; of unpredictable behavior; of unfathomable tangents and unexpected results; the fallout from inconceivable forces and our worst fears.

If there is a person who remains that I recognize, his back is facing me, and he is moving away; and in time, I will no longer be able to pick him out as distinguishable from the horizon toward which he walks. Time sweeps us all regardless of our will and with an insistence that cannot be resisted, to our next place, wherever that may be.

I wish I knew where he was going. Perhaps it is to a better place. Perhaps it is a place where what he believes truly is; where the best of what he imagines, cannot equal the majesty of what he finds.

But I suspect that as much as we are able to expand, we are also able equally to contract. There is much that is possible, but there is an equal measure that can never be. For every East there is a West; and for every North there is a South. But to find my way through the maze of my misery, it may be that only God’s compass will suffice.

The silence that greets the name of my son, written in an instant upon the tide of time and creation, is profound; and if I could, I would give him every measure of my own longer instance, that he might write his own questions there, and he might break the silence and shatter the stillness with his own strong, sweet voice.