Until the day before yesterday when I received the news, my head was an empty shell, my heart a deserted place. For years I learned to live this way, exiled from my own soul. So I wouldn’t fall easily. So the worm of despair wouldn’t consume me. To endure all the maybes of the world. Applications, letters and pleas^ supplications and tears^ thousands of doors^ thousands of broadcasts on the radio^ thousands of missing persons reports^ endless comforting pats and heartfelt grimaces from others. What could they do? What could they tell me? Could they really? They were faces without a voice, lips without speech. For whole years my soul drifted in this quarantine of boundless absence. Years of loneliness and grief. Scattered leaves were my endurance, gathered again and again by the wind of despair. Scattered leaves and their futile words blown by the wind of helplessness: “Patience…” “Courage…” “Hope always dies last…” But it was true. I did not die, I held on to hope.
For so many years I lived only for this moment. The sacred moment when my tearful eyes first saw the ship entering the harbor and bringing her back into my arms. Only God knows how I held back and didn’t dive into the sea from my longing to be with her an hour sooner. Close to the only person I had left, who kept me tied to the dock of life^ my only daughter. A little girl barely older than that when they separated us. Milk still in her mouth. A bud was her little body that I never got to see bloom. I didn’t enjoy it, I didn’t savor it. Only the thorns^ only the thorns I savored.
