Paper Boats

March 12th 2026

I am sitting up in bed with a cat in my lap who’s releasing long heavy sighs as he drifts back to sleep.

The walls of our home feel tender and sacred today. The sky is thick with fog and the tree limbs are dripping with rain.

Something powerful and precious is happening, something not to be rushed.

It's 8am and there's not a sound in the house but the ceiling fan turning and the click of the air handler going on and off.

It’s never a good time to have a cold, well, that’s not exactly true.
This is a great time to have a cold.
The weather is perfect for it.

My emotions are heavy and damp, why shouldn't my head be?

My partner is far out at sea on his own, riding waves in a paper boat surrounded in the same fog.

This morning I rested my forehead on his back, between his shoulder blades where my face fits just right.

He breathed out slowly.

He misses his father. It won't go away.

Last night I turned down the burner under the pot of soup on the stove and placed a heavy lid on top.

He stood at the kitchen island rolling his knuckle wraps for the next days boxing class.

"Sometimes it feels like a small child doesn't it?"

I said,

"Like you're on the phone with customer service and this child won't stop crying for your attention and pulling at your arm and you try to quiet them but you've just got to get this next thing finished-"

He looked at me and nodded slowly,

"Yeah, that’s ... actually pretty accurate."

I want to cradle him and help him birth that despair and be done with the labor pains but I know babies tend to come when they’re ready.

I never met his paternal grandmother Peg, although her elephants are everywhere around our home.
They’re raising their trunks on our mantel and holding our fortune of nickles and dimes in their big porcelain belly.

His favorite memory of her is of her sitting alone in the garage late at night. Posted on a stool next to an open door while it rained, smoking a cigarette and ashing into a seashell, reading Dreamcatcher.

I remember him saying how she ran down the hallway calling to him,

"Joseph, wake up!"

When her son, his father, was dying.

I can't imagine that kind of pain, that kind of loss at such a young age. When a boy really needs his father.

I know despair but no two are exactly alike, and sometimes I feel frustrated I can't meet him there.

I look at his eyes and see him as a young boy and I hold his hand and scoot closer to him, like I'm comforting him in his childhood bed, telling him he won't have to stay in that terrible house. He won't have to listen to the rats scratching at the dryer vent at night and the wolves walking in the mud outside his bedroom window.

I squeeze his hand to say if he will just hold on, he will travel the world. He will swim with manatees in Belize. And he will hear his father’s song in a small town square in Italy and he will stay in bed with me for days and watch the snow fall and sing Ray Stevens like we knew we’d find each other even when we were just kids.

I hold him closer and he lays his head on my shoulder. And I squeeze my eyes tighter as I wrap my arms around him and think of him hiding under his bed at night and I whisper through time,

"You’re gonna make it. You’re gonna be more than ok. I’m sorry you’re not gonna marry Shania Twain, but you are gonna marry me and I’m pretty alright. And it’s gonna be painful when you get older because your dad won’t be at our wedding, and he won’t get to camp with us on our property way in the mountains- but he will be there. He will be there when you teach me how to catfish and hook a worm. He will be loving you and so proud of you even when you can’t see him. And it will feel cruel when you get older and your hands begin to look like his and your shoulders get wider like his and your face becomes square and the wrinkles around your eyes look like his. You will miss him just like you did when you were 13. But you are safe now and I will love you. And you won’t have to punish yourself for hurting because life can feel unfair when you’re 13 and life can feel unfair when you’re 37. A heart that’s aching is a heart still beating and you won’t have to carry it alone anymore. You will love and be loved by people with such fierce courage because you learned to carry that ache like a child who needs love."

I called him just an hour ago to apologize for not handling the morning better.
For wanting to feed him vitamins and advice rather than just let him be still and do is sudoku.

I want to rush in.

I want to paddle out to him and tell him paperboats don’t last long at sea, he needs to have a plan for when the sides fold in. But I also know it’s time for him to get over his fear of the water.

"My dad was such a good swimmer,"

he says,

"he could just float on his back for hours. He was so good at it."

And I whisper,

"You will be too."

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