On one fateful morning,
Twenty long years ago,
A little girl left school early
To return home to sorrow.
No one said a word;
They didn’t really have to.
The man she loved the most,
Was gone, this, she knew.
As the years passed by,
And the memories grew dim,
She learned to move on
But she never forgot him.
There were occasional barbs;
She was accused of not caring enough.
But how could they know,
What she felt when times were tough?
What would it have been like,
Growing up with him there?
Life would have truly been different,
It wouldn’t have seemed so unfair.
A bad grade in math class,
A rude remark at dinner;
Were he to rebuke her for these,
She would still have been a winner.
She never had the chance
To talk about a man,
To hear him telling her,
“Walk away while you can.”
She had none of these,
And she never would.
And twenty years later,
At the water’s edge she stood.
She wrote a little message
And put it in a bottle.
She watched it float directionless,
Like a boat without a throttle.
The message read:
“I don’t miss you enough, they say,
Because I don’t talk about you.
But I don’t have to convince them,
Just you. I miss you, Papa, I really do.”
