Papa

Papa

Papa,

you exist for me

as an equation without numbers,

a presence proved

only by its absence.

I know your name

the way one knows infinity—

by concept,

not by touch.

Your voice is a theory

never tested,

your smile a hypothesis

that time refused to verify.

I was too small

to store memory.

My mind, then,

was an unfinished vessel;

experience passed through me

before it could settle.

Thus, God removed you

not from my life,

but from my knowing.

What remains

is a blurred photograph—

evidence, not intimacy.

A relic,

like light from a dead star:

proof that you existed,

arriving only after you were gone.

Sometimes I reason

that goodness must be measured,

and perhaps mine was insufficient—

for loss often convinces the living

that punishment precedes crime.

Yet logic fails here,

as it always does

in matters of love.

God keeps you now

in a realm I cannot access—

not because I am unworthy,

but because I am still alive.

Life itself

is the distance between us.

So I ask only this:

that you are cared for

in the order of things unseen,

that love, like energy,

is neither destroyed nor taken—

only transferred

until the equation completes

and absence resolves

into presence again.