Two timelines.

On this day, you are seven. Your younger brothers are so excited to eat cake and watch you blow out the candles—more flames than they’ve ever seen lit for a birthday—that they’ve been bouncing off the walls in anticipation. You are fair with wavy auburn hair just like your dad’s, but tinted with brown like mine, and you wave the pandemic-length hairs out of your eyes with a single, confident shake. You are strong, robust, with an inclination for sport, watching soccer matches and cheering on our family’s favorite team (come on you Spurs!) and kicking the ball out in the backyard every weekend. You love to read and sometimes, I watch you from the threshold as you read with your blankets pulled up over your knees, your face animating the pages by the light of your bedside lamp. Your smile is wide like mine.

*****

On this day, you are seven. It is too cold to go out, so we can’t visit you on your birthday to read you your favorite book, Where The Wild Things Are. We named you after its main character, expecting a rambunctious, ferocious force of a boy. It’s the only book you ever heard, if you could, in fact, hear—the doctors said you had no brain activity, so our voices may just have been for ourselves, for the knowing that we did something parents do with babies they get to bring home. You are actually where the wild things are, in a hidden wood of a cemetery up north, laid to rest in nature where the hawks in the trees are your protectors and the snow on the ground in winter your warm blanket. Whenever I bring purple flowers to lay on your grave, the sky gives me a sign—the snapping of a branch, the cawing of a crow—that they have been received by you, where you are now.

*****

On this day, you are seven. Your life is both in the ground and in my imagination. You are the question mark, the what-if in every scenario: every bounce on the trampoline, every cookie-filled grin, every how many kids do you have. You are in the silence and in every word. Time snaps these melded moments back to the present, a reminder of your absence. We are your family in these two timelines. I am your mother. You are seven, but you are not here today. I will always wish you were.