Not the big things. I said the big things.
I said I love you regularly and I meant it and she knew I meant it and on the days when the love was complicated, when the love sat next to frustration and the not-quite-understanding and the old unresolved architecture of a mother and daughter who are similar enough to generate heat, I still said it, because the love was always true even when it was not always simple.
What I did not say enough were the small specific things.
I did not say: the way you laugh before the joke is finished is one of my favourite sounds in the world and I have it in my body the way I have music, the way I can hear a song without the song playing because the body holds it. I did not say: I watched you work every day of my childhood and I understood nothing about how hard it was and now I understand everything and I am sorry it took me this long and I am grateful in a way that has no adequate word in English, or possibly any language, for what you did in all those ordinary days that did not ask for acknowledgment and did not receive it.
I did not say: you made me brave. Not the kind of brave that requires a moment or a crisis. The daily kind. The kind that is just continuing, just getting up and doing the thing again, just not stopping even when stopping would be easier and no one would blame you for it. You modelled that so completely that I absorbed it without knowing I was absorbing it, the way children absorb the essential things, without noticing, through the walls.
I am saying it now.
I do not know how much of it she can receive, on the harder days when the fog is thicker and the words land but do not quite stay. I say it anyway. I say it because it is true and because the saying matters even if the receiving is incomplete, because love that is only expressed when it can be fully received is love that is waiting for conditions that will not always be met.
I say it for both of us now. For her to hear as much as she can hear, and for me to say as clearly as I can say it, so that when she is gone the words will have been spoken out loud in a room where she was present and that has to be enough.
It has to be enough.
