When my only child leaves

there will be no ceremony.

Just a suitcase

unzipped on the bed

like a mouth

I cannot argue with.

I will stand in the doorway

of his almost-room—

walls already practicing

how to forget the sound of him.

The closet will hang open,

a row of empty shoulders.

He will say it’s temporary.

Two years.

Maybe more.

As if distance

does not grow teeth.

I will nod the way mothers do

when they are swallowing glass.

I raised him to be curious—

to look past the fence line,

to ask what the horizon was hiding.

I did not realize

the horizon

would answer.

The morning he goes

the airport will be fluorescent and cruel.

Strangers rolling their lives

behind them on wheels.

I will hold him

the way I did

when he was small—

but now my chin rests

on a shoulder

that no longer fits beneath it.

There is a particular violence

to watching your only child

walk toward security

without turning back fast enough.

The house will bruise.

His room will keep

the pale square on the wall

where something once hung.

A ghost of light.

Dust will settle

with the patience of saints.

At night

I will calculate the time difference

like a penance.

Morning there.

Dark here.

I will picture him

crossing streets

that do not know the first story

of his name—

how I whispered it

over a hospital crib,

how it felt like striking a match

in a dark room.

The ocean between us

will not roar.

It will simply exist.

Wide.

Indifferent.

And I will learn

that love does not loosen

when stretched—

it thins.

Transparent as thin as breath on glass.

Sometimes

I will stand in the kitchen

holding nothing,

and the quiet will feel

like a tide that forgot

to return what it took.

I will bless him anyway.

But blessing

is not the same thing

as relief.