By Sandhya Narayanan
I press my face against the cold glass,
watching the airplane wheels spin,
With the same prayer I whispered as a child,
fingers tracing circles in the dust of our never-traveled roads.
Amma, do you remember,
how we used to promise each other that tomorrow would taste like freedom?
How you'd smile that careful smile, the one that held back dreams like water behind a dam?
Your hands, always warm against my fevered forehead, never clutched boarding passes with excitement. His voice - sharp as winter wind would cut through our whispers: "Money doesn't grow on trees"
But trees do grow, Amma.
Trees grow tall enough to touch the sky from 30,000 feet.
Now I sit beside someone who sees the world through eyes that mirror your kindness, who takes my hand when the wheels lift off the ground and doesn't ask why I'm crying.
We drive through mountains where the air tastes like all the freedom you never swallowed, where the bonfire crackles stories you should have heard, where the wind carries your laughter that was never allowed to echo off canyon walls.
My love traces the map of sorrows on my palm, reads the geography of guilt written in my pulse. "She would want this for you," comes the whisper, and I know it's true.
Your dreams were always bigger than his small heart.
The wheels keep turning, Amma, carrying me toward sunsets you'll never see, but I carry you in the way I gasp at mountain peaks, the way I close my eyes and let the wind baptize my face, the way I finally understand that your love was the only journey that ever mattered.
In the space between departure and arrival,
between your unfulfilled dreams and mine coming true,
I find you in every turning wheel… still spinning, still praying, still hoping that somewhere, somehow, love learns to fly.