Every morning,
she asks me,
Mama, will you draw with me?
It is an invisible thing
like breath,
something I expect
but hardly notice.
Some days I draw with her,
but most days I don’t.
Yet, I know
one day soon,
I will wake up
and she will not ask.
This will not count
as a tragedy, of course,
but still a small part of me will die,
the part of me that will notice
that this invisible thing
like breath,
is gone.
I will reach for it,
in that devastatingly optimistic way,
that drowning people do,
confused that something invisible,
something they expected
but hardly noticed,
is suddenly all they want.