Dear Daughter

Five years today

Same church sign, same highway

Red roses on a rusted gate

Your name carved in that gray slate

Pulled up slow

Engine humming like a tired ghost

Rearview full of what I lost

Front seat full of empty thoughts

Mama keeps askin’ if I’m eatin’

Daddy says I should stop drinkin’

I just trace your little handprint

On the window, still there, faint and bent

Dear daughter

What is to become of me now

Dear daughter

Who am I in this hollow house

All these what-ifs drown me

Every mile, every memory

Dear daughter

What could we have been, you and me

Would you hate math

Love old trucks, or talk back

Sneak that lipstick in your backpack

Roll your eyes at my old tracks

First heartbreak

Would you slam doors, stay awake

Call me cryin’, say he’s fake

I’d say, “Baby, hearts bend, they don’t break”

I see your shoes by the front door

They don’t fit you anymore

You stayed four, world moved on

But in my mind you still grow strong

Dear daughter

What is to become of me now

Dear daughter

Who am I in this hollow house

All these what-ifs drown me

Every mile, every memory

Dear daughter

What could we have been, you and me

If I’d left five minutes later

If the sky had held back rain

If the light had stayed on red

Would I still know this kind of pain

If you’d made it to December

Would we fight about your curfew time

Would I still be this broken

Or just some other shape of tired

Dear daughter

What is to become of me now

Dear daughter

I keep calling out somehow

All these what-ifs haunt me

Like a song stuck on repeat

Dear daughter

You’re the road I never reach

(Young Female Vocalist):

"Mama

You keep asking what is to become of you

Look at your hands

They still fold in prayer, even when you’re mad at heaven

You think I stayed on that dark road

But I learned to run on light

You think you lost me in that moment

But I slipped into every sunrise you don’t bother to watch

Mama

You wonder what I’d be

I am your stubborn, your mercy

Your laugh when you don’t mean to

Your voice when you sing in the kitchen alone

Stop living in the crash

Live in the love that drove you there

I am not in the sirens

I am in the quiet after, when you finally breathe"

(Young Female Vocalist):

"Dear mama

What is to become of you now

You become the woman who survived

You become the story that helps someone else drive slow"

(Young Female Vocalist):

You keep writing, “Dear daughter”

So I’m writing back in your heart

I never left the passenger seat

I just moved a little closer to where you can’t see

(Young Female Vocalist):

Dear mama

I am okay

Becoming

Is still for you too