The Prince

Dear Prince,

When the idea first struck me to write you a letter, it didn't occur to me to make sure it ever found you. And suddenly I find myself with half the nerve to make certain it does one day.

You are three years old at the time of my writing this. Many years prior to your understanding of this message. Many years late to that of my own.

You are far too young to understand debt, or favor, or the strange arithmetic by which one life alters another. And yet I owe you a great one.

You will never know me. You will never be aware of my existence. And yet I will always be aware of yours, both in your own form, and in the form you left inside me. There is an unsettling asymmetry in that. It haunts me profoundly.

The relationship I had with your mother was something like a falling star. Spiritually exhilarating, emotionally violent. Brief, yet undeniable. And after putting out the fire, I still find myself looking up at the smoke trail it left in my mind’s sky.

That sky is filled with the debris from other impacts and passings I question, some smog, fragments, I often contemplate the pieces both as what they are, and as what they were meant to construct.

Attachment.

I thought I had an understanding of what that was comprised of. A clear trail left behind one can trace to a source. But my attachment to you has no trail. No thread to follow. Just a.. dent. A shape left behind from an impact you never had a chance to make in me.

You were.. an almost. But are.. a certainty. Cohesively, and not mutually exclusively.

I got to know you through pictures. First ones on a screen. Then one in a locket your mother wears around her neck, shaped in a golden heart. It opens to reveal something deeper than love while remaining a still surface. The way a mirror holds a reflection. I cannot quite tell whether the photo of you in that necklace is a reflection of you, or something in me. Perhaps it's both simultaneously.

I adored the stories of you. I accounted the facts of you. I compiled the shreds of you. I missed out on a life with you. But I still tour my mind's repertoire of you.

When two objects avoid collision but come close enough to graze each other. The ecstatic glow of her expression upon the utterance of your name was something akin to ignition.

The closest I got to you was a friction burn.

I observed you not as you are, but through moments of you I didn't share. What I was left with were afterimages without a beforehand. That makes meeting you feel less like guessing something unseen, and more like remembering something forgotten.

I had to construct the idea of you without you there to do it. Many incomplete moments like that were what assembled the mosaic.

The first time you came into my orbit, it wasn't the way your mother did. It didn't rip the sky open in reverence the way it should have. It wasn't the unapologetic break of a sunrise. It was the quiet and reluctant encroach of an umbra.

"I do need to tell you something. I have a son.”

I forgive her for that. It's important that you do the same. Her perception of you is never an appraisal of you.

Your mother loves you unconditionally while being a stranger to herself. It is, and always will be, a constant battle to reconcile that contradiction.

I hope she strikes the best balance for you both.

I hope she does not ever allow the world to reduce you. It will try. It always does. She wasn't necessarily wrong to expect that of the world.

Or of me.

I hope she sees you clearly. Before you are named, categorized, or explained away.

Because the way she looks at you now will outlive her voice. It will remain in you long after she is no longer there to speak it.

At the time of my writing this, you do have a father.

I hope your father does not foolishly squander the blessing bestowed upon him: your existence. The privilege of guiding you through the waves of life. The honor of teaching you how to hold the boat steady when the world tries to tear the vessel apart.

I warn you that it does so mercilessly, and without end.

I hope he teaches you to love the way he teaches you to fight. And I hope he teaches you that the two come from the same place, they are appendages of the same body, extensions of the same force.

Above all, I hope he teaches you discernment. The restraint to know that such force is sacred, and when protection becomes destruction. How it happens sometimes as a slow bleed. How it happens other times as a laceration. How the line between them is seldom thick enough to walk cleanly. And how, as a man, you will be expected by the world to do so regardless without fail.

To the prince I will never crown king, to the kingdom we will never share, I hope they see you through what is owed to you.

As an intentful completion.

And I hope not that you ever endure a life the way I did.

As a fallen design.

With something adjacent to love, as adjacent as you are to a son,

—Sam