Between Bruises and Blooms

They gave the monster a name.

Not fate. Not chance. Not something I did wrong.

A name made of too many syllables and not enough mercy.

For weeks, I carried guilt like it belonged to me, turning every memory over in my hands, searching for the moment I thought I had failed you.

Then the answers came.

It wasn’t your heart, my beautiful girl.

It was your lungs— tiny breaths that could never become life because the smallest vessels had never learned how to grow.

Congenital Alveolar Capillary Dysplasia.

A name so clinical for something so cruel.

A disease so rare that no one could have found it before it had already stolen you from us.

There was nothing I could have done.

Those words should have brought peace.

Instead, they made room for anger.

Anger that I’ll never know the colour of your eyes.

That your laugh will forever live only in the imagination of a mother who never got to hear it.

You’ll never have a first crush. A first kiss. A graduation. A wedding day.

Your daddy will never walk you down the aisle, and I’ll never sit beside you, trying to explain what it means to grow up.

Every first was taken before it ever had the chance to begin.

But if your life leaves anything behind, I hope it is this—

That one day, medicine learns the language your tiny lungs could never speak.

That another family hears different words.

That another mother gets to bring her baby home.

Because no parent should ever have to memorize the name of the monster that stole their child.