u/JediV17

She was not taken.

That would have left fingerprints.

No

she vanished the civilized way:

slowly,

through edited memories

and careful hands

washing my name from the walls.

Now I haunt her indirectly.

In the pause before she answers

when someone asks whose eyes she has.

In the instinct to apologize

for taking up space.

In the small animal panic

of being loved too suddenly.

There is a grave somewhere

without dirt,

without flowers,

without proof.

I kneel there daily.

The cruelest thing about losing a daughter

is that motherhood does not stop with her absence.

It keeps growing

like roots searching

through concrete

for a child-shaped wound

that no longer speaks back.

Some nights

I hear her childhood

moving through the house

like cutlery in another room.

But when I open the door,

even the silence

refuses to call me mother.