Rosalie Louise

I loved her before she ever existed.

That’s the part that ruins me.

She was never a baby in my arms, never a little girl at my feet, never a teenager rolling her eyes at me, never a woman I got to know by watching her become herself. She was only a name, a want, a shape I kept building in my head until it started to feel like something I had already lost.

I gave her milestones I never got to see. First cry. First steps. First day of school. A scraped knee. A birthday candle. A school picture. A voice calling for me from another room. I made a whole life out of moments that never happened, and somehow that makes it hurt worse. Because I know exactly what I lost, and I lost it before it ever had a chance to live.

I think she would have been beautiful in that real, complicated way children are when they carry pieces of everyone who came before them. She would have grown into herself slowly, through music and mess and laughter and the things that shape a person when nobody is trying to control the outcome. She would have taken what was broken in us and, for a while, made it mean something gentler. Something better.

That’s what I can’t get over. She was supposed to be the part that made everything make sense. The child who turned pain into purpose. The one who would have been proof that all of it led somewhere. Instead, I have to live with the fact that I loved a future so hard it became a grief.

So this is the goodbye I never thought I’d have to say.

Goodbye to the tiny hands I never held.

Goodbye to the voice I never heard say my name.

Goodbye to the little girl who lived only in hope.

Goodbye to Rosalie Louise, the daughter I carried in my heart long enough to know the shape of the hole she left behind.