For the orphans with living parents—
Who grew up in houses that were never homes. Who learned to tiptoe before you learned to dance. Who became fluent in the language of closed doors and turned backs, of love with conditions you could never quite meet.
You who searched every adult's face for the tenderness that should have been your birthright. Who watched other children run to their parents while you calculated the safest distance from yours. Who carry a homesickness for a place that never existed, the sanctuary you never got to have.
This is for those still searching for the ones who will see you shivering in your adult body and recognize the child who never got warm enough. For the fierce protector who will stand between you and the world's teeth, not because they must, but because they cannot imagine doing otherwise. For the one who will call you theirs with such certainty that you finally believe you belong to someone good.
I am searching too. For the one who will teach me to hold a sword steady when my hands shake with old fears. Who will sit with me through the poison of old wounds, refusing to let go even when the healing hurts worse than the hurting. Who will see me flinch at nothing visible and understand I'm dodging ghosts they'll help me fight.
For the gruff voice that will call me stubborn and impossible and mean it as endearment. For the weathered hand on my shoulder that says “you're mine now” without words. For the parent who chooses me not from obligation or blood, but from recognition: “this one needs me, and I have been waiting to be needed like this.”
We are all searching for the family that will find us in the forest of our exile and say: “come, child, you've been alone long enough.”
I refuse to believe they aren't out there—these collectors of lost children, these menders of broken wings, these fierce guardians of the abandoned. They must exist. They have to. Because surely the universe wouldn't make so many of us orphans without somewhere making the parents we were meant to have.
Until we find them, or they find us, we have this: the knowledge that we are not the only ones looking. That somewhere, maybe, someone is also searching for a lost child to love properly, completely, without condition or caveat.
And maybe, maybe, the searching itself is a kind of belonging. All of us orphans, walking through the world with our arms outstretched, looking for home.
—For every inner child still waiting to be found