Today I woke with a loaf of lead on my chest.  After a moment it turned into your name.

I write this letter to you shyly; I have no claim to you but I would like to call myself your friend.

I go to the special needs classroom grinning like a foolish woman because it is full of sunlight and holy children; my son is there, you are there.  You are there: a tiny body, outsized squarish head, trach tube.  Your smile is a wondrous circle of teeth.

I see you sitting in a grocery cart.  Your mother turns abruptly when I shout your name.  Who is this dowdy person who knows my son? I would be startled too; I’m sorry.  But now I sail my shipload of vegetables and toilet paper down florescent aisles and into my dirty minivan and finally home so that I can say, Guess who I saw at the store today?  You’ll never guess.

I wait for the yellow bus.  My son’s seat is at the very back but you sit right by the door.  I wave to you, I call your name.  When Teko the little white dog is at our house I tuck him under my arm when the bus comes.  I hold him up to your window to see the frenzy and delight mirrored from both sides of the glass.

One day I peek inside the bus and see tender, tube-shaped feet bare and dangling.  The tiniest of the tiny toes is bleeding; you shuck your winter boots whenever you get half a chance and this time you’ve torn a nail.  I cluck like a mother and admonish the bus driver, but what I really want to do is kiss that toe.  I drew a picture of this but I’m not very good at drawing from memory.  The picture is slack and cartoonish when I wanted something different, and I’ve never shown it to anyone until now:

I didn’t kiss that toe.  You are fragile and not mine and what kind of a weirdo am I anyway?  And what right do I have to weep now that you’ve quietly shucked not only your boots, but your trach tube and shunt and all manner of medical devices?

Someone I know has invented a home for her third son.  She has given him up to a place where he lives high up in a blue sky, in a roofless, sheepskin-draped room with kind minstrels and acrobats that let him stay up late and eat chocolate by starlight.

I tresspass here to invent for you a sea of squirming, ecstatic little white dogs.

I tresspass here to kiss your little toe.