Sixteen Years I Didn’t Speak to My Mother. Then I Went Missing, and From Her Sickbed She Said “Go Find Her”

And that, I have come to believe, is what love actually looks like once the easy warm part of it has burned off and the hard years have set in.

It is not a feeling.

Feelings are cheap and they come and go.

It is a crib you cannot make yourself throw away, kept through sixteen years of anger by a woman too stubborn to call and too loyal to let go.

She never once, in all that time, stopped being my mother.

She just could not find the door, the same as me.

The crib was the door.