A daughter

For Sana Some days, I say your name quietly, as if you are sleeping and I might wake you. Other days, I say it through tears, through a heart that has forgotten how to hold this much love and this much loss at the same time. I miss you in ordinary moments— when I see something you would have loved, when a song comes on, when someone says something that reminds me of you. I miss you in the extraordinary moments too— the ones I imagined you would be here for. Your birthdays. Your celebrations. The little milestones I thought I would watch you reach. Grief is strange, Sana. You can be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. I carry memories of you in photographs, in stories, in songs, in the deepest corners of my heart. And sometimes I don't want to be strong. Sometimes I want to sit alone and cry loudly for the daughter I should still be holding. I have stopped asking myself why some days hurt more. Maybe there doesn't always have to be a reason. Maybe love simply has nowhere to go when the person we love is no longer here. So I let myself miss you. I let the tears come. I let the ache have its space. Because healing, I am learning, doesn't mean leaving you behind. It means learning to walk through this life with you missing from my arm but still present in everything that I am You were my daughter. You are still my daughter. And nothing—not time, not distance, not death— can change that. I will carry you for as long as I live. And on the days when the missing becomes unbearable, I will remind myself: This pain exists because the love was real. And Sana, I would choose that love a thousand times over.