From here I love you

soft piano, slow, unresolved chords)

I don’t know how to say this

without breaking open.

So I’ll say it the only way I know how—

true.

I carried you longer than I was allowed to keep you.

That’s the sentence that never leaves my body.

I learned how to mother without hands,

without bedtime,

without a place in the room.

People think giving up is quitting.

They don’t understand

what it costs to let go

so someone else can live.

From here, I love you.

From silence, I stay.

From the life I wasn’t given

I found another way.

I don’t need you to know me.

I don’t need you to choose.

From here, I love you—

that’s the truth.

I only get pieces of you now.

A guarded voice.

A closed door.

I hear the distance in your pauses.

I feel the questions you don’t ask.

There’s a grandchild I love without holding.

A wedding I won’t stand inside.

Milestones that move forward

while I learn how to grieve quietly.

I don’t blame you

for protecting yourself.

I know where that instinct comes from.

It came from me.

From here, I love you.

Through years I don’t touch.

Through conversations I don’t get

and moments I miss too much.

I don’t need forgiveness.

I don’t need a role.

From here, I love you—

with my whole soul.

I didn’t disappear.

I didn’t forget.

I didn’t move on.

I carried you into every version of myself.

Every choice.

Every breath.

I loved you loud enough

to step back.

And that is the wound

I live with.

(piano drops to single notes)

From here, I love you.

And maybe one day you’ll see

that everything I survived

was because of you in me.

If you ever wonder who I was

or why it went this way—

from here, I love you.

I always stayed.

You don’t have to understand me.

You don’t have to call.

You don’t have to open the door.

Just know—

you were never abandoned.

Not in my body.

Not in my heart.

Not once.

(piano resolves softly, unfinished)