My Parents Died Before Graduation and I Thought No One Would Be There for Me — Then Two Hands Covered My Eyes From Behind

And here he was dismantling his whole life, on purpose, to make sure I would never have to feel that again.

There was nothing I could say to that.

There is nothing you can say to that.

You can only let the tears come, and let yourself, for the first time in far too long, be someone worth coming home for.

And the tears came up in my eyes again — but they were not the tears of the morning, not the hot exhausted tears of the island.

These were something else entirely.