Sometimes I Choke

Sometimes a memory barrels in and I choke, thinking (knowing?) you died without knowing I saw what you did for me. I knew. You thought you had to tell me. Account for and track, but I was a kid who didn’t know you weren’t supposed to do those things. I had no vocabulary for gratitude. Which is really the gift–you protected me from so many things. Even myself. It was when you needed the reckoning, the validation. When you forgot…everything I am, that you claimed to admire and envy, existed because you gave me the space, the tools, to be.