Baby Doll
Someone called me baby doll today
like it was nothing,
like it was just a name
tossed casually across a workplace aisle.
But it wasn’t nothing.
Only two people ever called me that
One is still here,
alive and breathing
on the other end of a phone call
I keep meaning to make more often.
And it scared me
how quickly love becomes a reminder.
Because life is short.
Because tomorrow is not promised.
Because one day
even the voices we take for granted
become echoes.
And then my mind went to the other.
Her anniversary is coming up
like a quiet storm on the calendar,
and grief hit me the way it always does
unexpected,
unfair,
sharp in the middle of an ordinary day.
I miss her.
Later, I passed the flower display,
rows of softness
wrapped in cellophane and sweetness.
I used to say
I don’t like flowers.
Not because they aren’t beautiful,
but because they die too fast.
Because they remind me
that even the prettiest things
are borrowed.
But maybe that’s the point.
Maybe the beauty of life
is that it doesn’t stay.
That we are meant
to notice it while it’s here
to hold it,
to smell it,
to love it loudly
before it wilts into memory.
Maybe flowers aren’t tragic.
Maybe they are proof
that something can be breathtaking
even if it doesn’t last.
And maybe grief
is just love
reaching for what it can’t touch anymore.
So tonight
I will call and tell her I love her.
And I will whisper baby doll
into the quiet,
as if she might hear it
somewhere in the place
all beautiful things go
when they leave too soon.
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