I've been carrying you with me for the last few years...  I don’t know why. I guess I’ve been feeling a bit lost.  I think you’re cute. I wanted to get to know you.  But I didn’t realize who you really were until recently.  I don’t know why. I guess it’s just the way we get taught to do life...  The truth gets lost in time.  I grew up. You went away...  Where did you go? I did not know.  But the older I got the worse things got for me, and I guess that’s when I started to think about why I ended up this way more frequently.  I thought a lot about death.  How many ways I could die without committing suicide?  These thoughts made me think about you a lot...in a different way.   I’ve been trying to remember what you were like as a kid.  What you liked and didn’t like.  Unfortunately, most of what I remember is a lot of sad stories.  Hard times that caused a lot of hard cries.  Like the times when you got picked on and made fun for how you looked on the outside.  Kids can be so cruel at times.  And then there’s the times your mom dropped you off and broke your heart every other Sunday at 6 o’clock.   And the times your father tore you apart.   The times your friends made you feel like you weren’t good enough.  I also remember some good times.   Like the times down in Indian Point road.  But those times were few and far between...  I think about what you were like in your teens.   How hard it was to fit in when you were so different.   So strange and abstract.   And I think about what happened after that...  In college... In your twenties.  Then your thirties.  And as I sit here close to fourty, I wonder if you ever imagined you’d become anything close to who I’ve become...  And I wonder if you saw me now when you were really young...  Like back when you were say, 8 or 9 or 10, would you like who I am, back then?  Would you be in awe of me?  Would you want to be like me?  Would you love me the same way I loved Her before she died on me?  And I wonder if you be disappointed in me?  If you knew me in your twenties...  Old enough to know how hard life is, but not fully aware of how dark it can get.  I wonder if you would be devastated about what I did.  The way I handled things.  I wonder if you would be crushed by my bad decisions.  And I wonder if you knew you were going to die from a deadly disease, would you have done things differently than me?  I wonder if you would be afraid of who we were meant to be.  It’s hard to say how you would feel about me.  But as I sit here and daydream about us...  About our life growing up...  About all the stuff that happened to us.  More than anything, I wish I could give you a hug - at every age and every stage.  I wish I could see who you really were.  Your skin. Your eyes. Your teeth.  The lines and shapes your body makes.  Your personality traits.  If I could see you, I would tell you about all the times I messed up and why I hurt us.   I would tell you it wasn’t your fault.  I would tell you how loved you really are.   I would tell you why your mother and your father broke apart and I would tell you how awesome you really are.  I would tell you not to feel sorry for them. I tell you that you don’t have to be their parent.  I would tell you to be a kid. And I would tell you to hold onto your innocence.  I would tell you it’s ok to be strange, and I would tell you it’s cool to have fangs.  But I know I can’t go back in time...  But maybe I can change the future by reminding you here and now, in this moment in time and all the times to come...  I love you so much, my love.  I always have, I just didn’t realize who I was.  I didn’t see you the way I see you now, and I’m so sorry