Before my mom gave me birth

I’ve known my mother since before I had a shape, when my soul — a seed of silent stars, was still searching for its furrow. I was an imperceptible vibration, a faint flicker in the chasm between being and not-being, and she — the only soil where I could take root. She never promised time would be gentle, but she gave me her shoulders to carry it. Often, my path is nothing but a palimpsest without lantern or ink. I’ve come this far not because I could, but because, my mother’s prayers and hands, burned and cracked by time, stitched the skin of my words and wounds with light. She was a root that did not break before the storm, the hope within the wet eye of a child learning, slowly, how to die. And so it is, as long as I can still hear her voice, my soul still has a place what I can call “home.” But time, that silent thief, has tattooed longing into my bones, even before I was born onto this earth. Each second becomes a treasure I clutch to my chest, praying the wind won’t steal her from my arms like a dried leaf scattered around me. There’s a burning fire within me from which you gave me life, a flame that keeps me from weeping like a man without a God. A living light I shall wear always like a talisman carved from an undying fire. Your name shall become my new faith, one that asks for no other altar but your echo, whispered softly, when my prayers has no more words, only tears. I will write you in ink made of my blood, not upon parchment, but on the temple of eternity, and I will speak your name in all my silent sanctuaries, like the liturgy of a son who never fully broke away from the womb that bore him, until light splits once more in two, and your footsteps, a shining beam in the absolute abyss, will come to bring me back home.