A Letter To A Child I’ll Never Have

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Dear child,
I am a woman, born in the wrong body,
I faced an impossible choice: two truths that defined me.
To be a woman... or to hold you in my arms.
And I chose womanhood, I took the life you could have been.

At the age of 13, I had to choose my life at 30.
Each pill of Estrogen was like Cyanide to you
How bitter they tasted on both our tongues.

As the years go by
I wonder if you have my rosy cheeks
I wonder if you have my chubby hands
I wonder if you have my flat feet
I wonder if you look like me.

But your existence was chosen by a 13-year-old boy who just wanted to be a girl
Your life was thrown away by a child obsessed with Stampy
You were at the whim of someone who didn’t know how to make their own lunch.
Your fate was decided with every Barbie doll, necklace and tiara
I will never see your rosy cheeks blushing from embarrassment
Or knead your chubby hands when they're cold
Or comfort you over how it sucks to have flat feet.
I will never get to see or do or say these things because
You are not real

In choosing myself, in choosing womanhood,
I try to honor you.
This is my love letter, written in the silence of what you are to me
You are my gift
And you do exist

So fly, my phantom child,
paint your constellations
across the canvas of the world.
And know that in every breath
in every laugh born from the lessons you teach me,
my love for you, though unearned and undeserved,
burns brighter than any borrowed spotlight.

Sincerely,
Your own forever-phantom,
The woman who can’t create you, but whose heart will always cradle your memory.