Blueprint Ashes

Before the papers were signed, you were already gone.

Weekends became borders on a calendar wall.

A judge wrote your name where your presence should live,

and the silence you left became the lesson.

Fridays fenced like livestock on paper,

a doorway turned checkpoint for permission.

You called that balance—as if math could raise a child;

I called it growing wild between the lines.

You were granted the hours, but never claimed them.

Hope wore thin, like a suitcase I stopped packing.

By seven I knew better than to wait at the window—

some bones you learn to break so they stop aching.

You wired my nerves to expect retreat,

taught me to brace before doors could close.

I still feel that reflex in rooms full of fathers,

but I carry it now like a wind I’ve come to know.

It waits in ambush; a father laughing pulls the thread.

Sadness comes—not envy—but gladness

for the child who might never guess

whether their memory of love is real.

For a while, I sit with the weight of what you never built.

You didn’t raise me; you left me to grow.

Whatever became of me, I became without you.

Your fingerprints exist only in spaces

where nothing was ever offered.

I speak this for accuracy, not reply.

You came from a line that knew how to grow—

fields turned, seed coaxed, weather read.

You carried that forward, cultivating in secret,

but never across the distance between us.

What grew in me did so without your hand,

yet the lineage lived on through me.

I was not unfinished in the space you left.

I built myself without a blueprint,

stood in weather that offered no shelter.

Whatever steadiness I hold, I learned from hands not yours;

whatever strength I carry, I forged in your absence.

I became a whole person without your blueprint,

not a half-built frame waiting for return.

I built in the climate you abandoned,

and the proof of my life is what I made anyway.

You were never the architect—only the outline.

Your absence: the first landscape I crossed,

the hollow where I learned to grow.

I became a whole person without your blueprint,

not the fragment you left behind.

Whatever steadiness I learned came from hands not yours;

whatever strength I carry grew through the weather you made.

You are not the reason I stand upright;

you’re only the gap I bridged.

My life is not your monument;

it’s proof I outgrew the lack.

No revision can change the terrain I grew within,

and no alternate childhood will arrive.

The fact remains—rising and falling like weather—

not peace, not unrest—

just the final shape of something finished.

But I have always missed you.