Dear Vanessa,

I take baths with Luciana now.

I googled it first. Made sure it wasn’t weird. It’s not. Apparently a lot of parents do it. The internet has my back on this one.

It started after the diarrhea explosion situations. You know the ones. The ones where it’s easier to just get in the tub with her than to spray her down from the outside like a hazmat scene.

But then it kept going. Past the necessity stage. Into the regular stage.

Last night I had a new bath toy. Suction cup. Sticks to the side of the tub. NOT to any body parts, which is the relevant part of the review. I was playing with it. Sticking it. Pulling it off. Doing the thing toddlers do where you turn a normal object into a fifteen minute show.

And I noticed Luciana watching me.

Not the toy. Me.

That close kind of watching. Studying my face. The kind I get to have because I’m the only one left.

I loved it.

And then I hated that I loved it.

You needed forty hugs a day. I needed to be left alone. I came out of childhood ducking whenever someone reached. You reached anyway. I kept ducking.

Now I sit in two inches of lukewarm water with a toddler who insists on pouring more of it on my head, and I don’t want to be anywhere else.

I get it now.

I CRAVE it now.

And I hate that the only reason I crave it is because you’re gone.

She doesn’t know what she’s handing me. She’s just a kid with a suction cup, climbing on my legs, telling me to do the toy again. She has no idea I would have lived my whole life without this.

The intimacy you wanted with Luciana got stolen from you and handed to me.

I didn’t ask for it.

But now you couldn’t pry it from my cold dead hands.

Besitos,

Michael