# For My Son I have nothing to give you but these words, worn smooth as river stones, passed hand to hand through generations. You came into the world screaming— a small fury of becoming, your fists clenched around nothing but the will to live. I watched your eyes learn to focus, watched them move from blur to light, and I understood then that you were seeing the world for the first time, that everything was new and terrible and beautiful, and that I could not protect you from any of it. So I learned to let go before you even knew to ask. I have given you your mother's stubbornness, the shape of my father's hands, a tendency toward silence and sudden, inexplicable joy. I have taught you what I could: how to tie your shoes, how to stand when you fall, how to sit with sorrow without letting it consume you. But the rest— the becoming yourself, the fierce and lonely work of it— that is yours alone. So take these words like a map that shows no roads, like a compass that spins toward whatever magnetic north lives in your chest. Go. Find what calls to you. I will be here, in the quiet corner of your growing, proud in ways I cannot name, loving you most by knowing when to let you go.