Hear the children cryin'

Some mornings I wake from dreams that don’t announce themselves as dreams.

They slip into the day like breath into fog.

One in particular lingered.

 

My wife helps me dress. I wear red.

Not the red of slogans or flags—

but something soft and ridiculous,

like the costume of someone

who doesn’t yet know what they’re protesting.

 

She kisses my cheek, disappears.

And I go, alone, into the city.

 

It’s Paris, though it feels like no real city—

just a suggestion of boulevards, of grandeur,

of places where something is supposed to happen.

 

The march hasn’t started yet,

but the press sees me in red and comes running.

They ask, “What are you marching for?”

And I—

I haven’t prepared anything.

 

My French, always on the edge of itself,

stumbles. So I borrow Bob Marley:

“One love, one heart…”

They nod. Cameras flash. The lie is accepted.

Because it’s a beautiful lie.

 

And then I move through the crowd.

They are singing now, swelling.

And in their midst, there he is—

my father.

 

He’s seated not in a wheelchair,

but on one of those wheeled slabs used to move washing machines.

My brother and sister flank him, like royal aides.

They’re proud. They’ve got him out.

“It will do him good,” they say.

 

He doesn’t speak.

He nods once when I call his name,

but keeps looking somewhere else—

toward some point only he can see.

 

The crowd surges forward.

My siblings veer off, up a steep slope,

then over a fence,

off to some destination not meant for me.

 

And I think: How the hell am I going to get Dad up there?

 

But he surprises me.

He jumps from the slab like a man half his age,

begins to climb, hands and feet working in tandem.

 

I follow.

 

He’s ahead of me.

Then he slips.

 

I catch him.

His head lands in the hollow between my shoulder and neck.

It fits there like it’s always belonged.

 

And now I’m pinned.

His weight traps me.

Too heavy to climb,

too risky to descend.

 

His breath is failing.

I feel his rasping throat against my skin.

His sweat is cold.

 

We are cheek to cheek.

His head going down.

Mine angled up.

 

No one is coming.

I know that.

 

And in that stillness,

where struggle is pointless and time dissolves,

I think—

This is what grief is.

 

Not the fall.

Not the loss.

But the terrible intimacy of the moment

when you know you cannot carry them anymore,

and you also cannot let them go.