Missing

What do yu do when all of life is making do?
Today Lucas was very happy because he got the walls bilt. "I'm someone who can make fire from nothing." He was euphoric. He's been feeling his way to life out of the ground. What's been missing in his life is room, and welcome.
If he wasn't fierce, a fighter, he'd be dead.
I called him to ask him, "I saw a guy today, driving. What is a guy your age doing sucking a blue pacifier while driving a car he almost hits me with when he left turns?"
Lucas laughed. "It's something people used to do back in the day."
"Was he trying to quit smoking?"
Lucas didn't answer me. He wanted to tell me he and X got the wall done. "Everybody said we couldn't. But I can build a fire with nothing, and X learnd to rappel in thin air in the marines. "I can do anything I need to do."
They want to sell sandwiches at lunchtime in a warehouse district in Orlando because the jobs are missing and they're trying to invent themselves a job."
I'm not sure where the warehouse district is, only that it's not far from Alina's school. Almost as soon as he was done rejoicing in his built wall I heard her voice. He didn't tell her he was talking to Abuela. I was missing.
I heard him ask her, "Did you find the ball?" She said, "No, the ball is gone."
I'm always missing my granddaughter. I had sons and always imagined someday I would stumble onto having a girl. I never did. My eggs went missing before I ever got around to it.
Then 7 years ago Lucas did the stumbling and Alina was born. She has a life day in day out, full of moments where I'm missing, so I've missed most of her childhood.
And yet within moments of our being together she picks up our games where we left them off. There's one where we stack our hands higher and higher; another where we stare until one of us laughs; another where I follow her mind and do whatever she wants to do.
Some things that go missing I keep, and my bond with Alina is one. Even after months of separation we're together whenever we're together.
So maybe what's missing isn't actually gone. What is has room for space and void.
The other night I dreamt my dead father was standing by a window in my bedroom. He said nothing but he looked at me and his face was utterly full of love. I saw his face exactly as it was in life. No feature was erased or forgotten. I saw his small, brown yellow eyes darting with intelligence, his big nose, that small smile because he had a small mouth. I heard his mind telling me he was always with me.
Right after he was buried I felt a string between my breast and his being pulled and my heart being torn out of my chest. I couldn't stop thinking that I had forgotten to cut a lock of his hair before the casket was shut forever at the front of the church. All of him, especially that lock of hair I had imagined would let me keep him, was missing.
But in that dream I knew I got to keep him. The bond between his mind and mine lived on inside the holes where he was not.
The love we build together with the missing is a permanent quantity. Nothing is. It remains.
Lucas said X did some terrible things in Beirut. He had to. They all had to. He would have wanted to not do those things. He was shot in the gut.
And still with those same hands he got the wall built. He wanted to use loading docks for the outside of the wall but when they tore them up they were too rotten. They used gray siding instead. They got the wall built.
You build yourself up despite what's gone missing, with whatever you've got.
Alina said "I didn't find the ball. We'll have to get another one."
Anything might go. Everything goes missing in a cheating, capitalist world. We have the power to fill those voids with life, love, words, acts, vision, hope. It's not so much what's missing, it's what fills us. It's how we choose to fill the places where the people and the things are gone.