Have you seen my daughter?

She has long black hair, the kind with straight shining locks that she used to dip in jars of ink as a child. Her little fingers stretched to catch the ones that fell from their shelves, wincing as they crashed to the floor. When she heard me open the door, she started to cry, and sometimes it broke my heart, but sometimes it just made me mad. You always make a mess! That’s all you ever do! My son would scream at her. And the room would pressurize, the walls pounding with their ear-piercing cries until I felt tears squeezing from my eyes.

Tell me, please, have you seen her? She has the biggest eyes, the color of late autumn leaves, a vat of caramel sticky and dripping with crystals of sugar not yet melted. Those eyes, the ones that never seemed to close as a baby. Forever searching, scanning, yearning to reach out and touch the world. Her eyes watched everything. She never wanted to sleep. And sometimes, on those nights she couldn’t bear to rest, I’d slip us outside. Just the two of us, and we’d stare at the stars together, blinking away our sleep. It was the only time I ever saw her eyes stop wandering.

Yes, my daughter, the girl with the purple plastic snap bracelets and bubble gum chews. She wears loose floral dresses to hide her ever-growing body, no longer a child I can hold in my arms. The funny little girl who pops grapes and salty chips in her mouth after school, and sometimes a cherry lollipop if I let her. I can barely wake up in time to catch her before she’s out the door, hopping on one foot and tugging a blue Converse sneaker on the other. I look out the window and smile at her. Sometimes she sees me. Other days, I have to keep smiling, watching her gracefully skip down the street.

Yes, she is the one with the black jean jacket and baggy ripped jeans. The one who wears crop tops the size of my pinkie finger and golden chains around her neck. When she can, she paints her face with red gloss and dark powder, a face that no longer wrinkles with a smile that would light up the darkest night skies. The girl who used to fit between my arms is nearly twice my size now. I can feel her panic everywhere–her homework isn’t done, her hair isn’t right. She complains to me in the car how she isn’t sure who to sit with tomorrow: her boyfriend or the two girls in her math class. Since when did she have a boyfriend? It’s her laughter I miss, that beautiful sound of ringing bells and twinkling stars. I look out that window in the morning and catch her distant gaze, her mind and heart wrapped in crushing knots of worry. She leaves home so early…where did all those nights under the stars go?

My daughter, that funny little girl. Last night, the moon rose in the sky and beamed light onto our driveway, and I took her downtown for dinner. I watched her order intently; she got a salad and a side of fries. I ordered the same thing for myself. I watched her pick at her food until she started to cry, shuddering with some awful illness I can’t name. I can’t share her sadness. I can only hold her and whisper softly, as I used to when she was a little girl, it’s going to be okay. We ate the rest of our meals in silence. Where is your heart, little girl? Let me in, let me in.

The next morning, I blow her a kiss through my window. She grips the straps of her backpack a little more tightly. I hope, more fiercely than ever, that my love can travel through her protection of glass and wrap around her arms. I want to whisper in her ears soft, kind things, some way, any way to make her feel better. Could I catch her nightmares in a net, stomp on them until they dissipated into fine bits of sand and dust? Could I take away her worries, her fears, the shell of a grown-up covering the heart of my child?

Or is it too late, when I arrive at her school, standing amidst a crowd of other mothers crying for their little girls, their hearts lurching out of their chests? Is it too late to grab her before she gets to her classroom, to trap her and hold her tight against me? Is there no way to turn her back to a little girl, a stumbling child with dreams so big and wide? I reach out to her knowing that her hand has already slipped away from mine. But still I continue to reach, to cry her name and hope that one day she will run back into my arms.