I Love You Here and Beyond

I want to be missed by you. I want you to look for me in every corner. I want you to wonder if I am still near you. I want you to tell your children about me and to help them remember me. I want your tears to touch your beautiful face because you miss me. I want you to hold on to my pictures and seek my biological remainders in this world. I want you to touch what my fingers used to touch hoping to feel me near. I want you to write about me and wonder why I left so early. I want you to use all of your strength to breathe without me because that’s what it would take for our bodies to be separated by the thin veil of life and death. I want you to experience all of these things because it would mean your beautiful life would go on. Yet, here I am, missing you, longing for you in ways that only a mother who hasn’t touched her baby for 389 days understands. I want you to know, I miss you and I love you here and beyond. For wherever you are, there I am, too. And wherever I am, you are always with me, whispering over and over, “I am right here, mom, I am right here.”