I see you everywhere. I tell my therapist about it sometimes, seeing you, that is. I see you more than I think I should but I don't mind. In fact, I want to see you. I know that it's just in my head – I'm okay with the fact that I'm crazy – but I can't see you in real life and I regret that every day. If I have to settle for seeing you in my head, a hallucination if you want to call it that (sometimes my therapist does), I will. It makes you real.
I say that word to my therapist 'real' and she will shake her head at me every time. "Ginny," she'll say, "Ginny, it was real. It wasn't a figment of your imagination."
I don't like that she calls you an 'it'. I know you were a girl. I know they say that they can't check gender until a certain age but a mother can feel it. You were my daughter; are my daughter. I never know what way to put that; not in my own head, not out loud, never.
I dream about you too. In my dreams you are happy and beautiful – more beautiful than I thought a daughter of mine could be. Your eyes are blue in my dreams, the exact shade of your father's eyes. I don't know about your hair colour though. It's the same as mine at times, golden like wheat. I picture you to be a mini-me of your father; light eyes and dark hair. In my dream you tell me you are happy, your short fingers twining around my own for the briefest of moments. You tell me you forgive me too, before I leave you.
That's what means the most to me. The fact that I see you every day, with your changing hair colours and big, blue, blue, blue eyes and the fact that you forgive me is what makes me feel okay. I will, for the rest of my life, wish that I could have met you; have known for sure that you would have been a beautiful little girl with a dazzling personality and the pinkest of lips. I know I will see you someday, and that is enough for me. That someday I will meet you in heaven and have a chance at being your mother instead of a lost teenager who had an abortion because she didn't see another way out.
Until that moment, I will be content to hold your hand in my dream and blow kisses at your freckled nose as you peek at me from behind garbage cans on the street.
©The Last Letter