Five Years Later

It’s been five years, Dad.
Five autumns without your voice,
without your footsteps down the hall,
without your hands fixing the world in your own way.

Sometimes it feels unreal,
as if any day you might walk back in,
and all of this had only been a long bad dream,
one of those that ends when morning comes.
But morning comes,
and you’re not here.

You were forty-nine,
and I was only eleven.
I didn’t yet know what it meant to lose,
or that the word forever could hurt so much.

I remember the day you left
as if it were carved into the air:
the quiet voices,
the tears I didn’t understand,
and that feeling that something enormous had broken,
something that would never be the same.

Since then, I’ve grown without your advice,
without your laughter, without your “everything will be okay.”
I learned to be strong,
even if sometimes it’s just a way not to cry.
I learned to keep going,
even when I’d lost my direction,
even when the world felt too big
for someone who got stuck halfway through childhood.

I’ve changed, Dad.
I’m no longer the little girl you looked at with pride,
but I still wonder if you’d be proud of me now.
If you’d see something of yourself in me,
if you’d recognize your gestures in my hands,
or your silence when something hurts too much.

There are days I feel you near,
like a thought brushing against my skin,
as if you were watching over me from somewhere
where time and distance don’t exist.

I talk to you in silence,
as if my words could reach that place.
I tell you what’s happening,
I imagine you smiling,
and for a moment, everything feels calm again.

They say that pain fades with time,
but mine has only learned to grow smaller,
to hide on good days,
to return on gray ones.
Because love, Dad,
is never forgotten.
It only changes shape.

Five years later, I’m still looking for you,
not in dreams or in photographs,
but in the things that help me move forward:
in my strength,
in my laughter when I don’t notice,
in the part of me that still belongs to you.

And even though I can’t see you,
I promise I’m still walking,
still growing,
still loving you,
just as much as the day you left.