{five-minute-friday}

A collaboration of writers. A collage of pieces focused on one weekly prompt. A five-minute challenge to write raw and exposed. Completely unedited. Magnificently honest.

This Week’s Prompt: Find

I can’t find him.

I hear his cry, still such a new sound to me. He’s weeks old, and I hear him in distress. It takes a moment to gather myself, I wipe sleep from my eyes, turn on the backlight of my phone. My heart is now in full panic. I lean over the bed. Well, the mattress that we set atop the floor and call a bed. And there he is, flailing, helpless.

He’s slipped right out of the swing—that only place he’ll actually sleep. I should have buckled him in, but I assumed he was too small to maneuver his way out. He’s so small.

From then on out I’ll fasten those buckles religiously. For weeks I’ll hover under this new feeling of mom guilt. I should have buckled him in. For those 20 seconds I couldn’t find him in the night—I’ll never forget what I felt in those moments.

I’ll feel it again the day he first discovers the joy of hide and seek. I’ll run through our small house like a mad woman screaming out his name. I’ll discover him under my bed, given away by his muffled giggles.

In those desperate moments when I can’t find him, those moments in the store when he peeks around a corner, out of sight, and my heart stops—those are the moments that bring us back. We must know where they are.

There’s a sticker on my laptop that reads, “Where are you?” It comes from a Scooby Doo sticker book out of the Target dollar section. It was my boy’s. My husband found the sticker and placed it onto my laptop one day, where it remains, always asking me…Where am I?