14 Years

From 14 years ago… to now.

I haven’t seen or heard from Sophia in nearly two months now.

Time keeps moving quietly, relentlessly
sunrise after sunrise,
each one carrying the same unanswered question
into another day.

I don’t know how to fix this.
I don’t know where the bridge broke,
or how to rebuild something
I can no longer reach.

So I do the only thing left
I let her go,
and I wait.

I won’t dress this up as something it’s not.
There is no perfect life here,
no clean edges to this kind of absence.
Just a father
standing in the space where connection used to live,
holding onto something that no longer answers back.

I see her now only in fragments
a photo,
a moment,
a version of her life unfolding somewhere beyond me.

And in those glimpses,
I feel the quiet shift
the growing distance between who she is becoming
and what I still understand.

It’s not that I love her any less.

It’s that I’m learning what it means
to love from a distance
that keeps stretching
beyond my reach.

And still
every morning,
without fail

I carry her with me.