Sprout

From time to time, you remind me of someone I once knew, in the time before you, in a place you hardly know. I was married to this someone for a short time, years before you were born. As I took this photograph of you today, I could see how much it would resemble the one photograph of him I have kept, and almost cannot bear to look at.

I don't know how to explain this to you, as I will someday need to do, because it is a crucial part of your own story; the story of how I came to be here, at the appointed place, at the appointed hour, to meet you.

Neither do I know how to explain to you why it moves me to glimpse in you the life I abandoned. Only that it is like seeing green grass coming up through ruined earth. A seed from my own soul that insists its way up through the places I set fire to, in flight. Life. Irrefutable. Constant.

Nothing is ever lost.