The Space Where You Should Be
There is a kind of pain I carry that I don’t often speak out loud, not because it isn’t there, but because it is so deep it feels almost sacred. It’s the kind of pain that doesn’t come and go—it stays. It settles into the quiet places of my heart and becomes part of how I move through the world. No one will ever fully understand what it feels like to love a daughter who walked out of my life eighteen years ago. People may try to imagine it, may try to offer comfort, but unless you’ve lived this kind of absence, you can’t quite grasp the way it lingers, the way it reshapes everything without ever fully showing itself. Eighteen years is a long time. Long enough for so many things to change, for life to move forward in ways I never expected, for seasons to come and go without her in them. But there is something that has not changed, something that has remained untouched by time, untouched by distance, untouched by silence. I still love her. I have never stopped loving her. Not for a sing...