"I'm not a child anymore."

      Before there was time, I was there. In the darkness and the stillness.

      I was there when light was first created, and all the things that came after it. Space and rock and earth and plant and animal and man. I watched it all come into being without envy, without hate, without love. Thinking only that now it was and as it was, it was good.

      I waited without even knowing I was waiting. I waited for millennia beyond your measurement of time, but the time passed quickly for me.

      And then came the day you were born.

      I watched you come into this world as I had seen a thousand things come before you. But this was different. This was you. Screaming and bloody and beautiful. Infinitesimally young, incomprehensibly small. From the first moment, I loved you. Stubborn and impractical. Breakable. Your imperfections combined in such a way as to make you perfect for me.

      I watched you grow and, oh, the waiting. Your young years were like lifetimes for me, longer than all the millennia I had watched pass before. It was excruciating. Watching you fall. Watching you cry. Wanting to be your comfort and yet knowing that I had to wait for the day there would be an opening in your imagination large enough for me to fit through.

      And then, at last, there was. And there I was. And there you were.

      Sometimes when I look at you I still see that fifteen year old girl, staring up into the sky. Waiting for life to happen to her, not knowing that instead I would happen to her. You still have some of her look -- he touched my face with the back of his hand, his knuckles gliding across my cheek for just an instant before they were gone -- but you are not that girl anymore.

      When I call you ‘child,’ it’s not because I see that little girl, it’s because you will always be a child to me. No matter what your age or my love for you. You can never hope to have the number of years I have had, nor the number I will have long after you’re gone. But nor can you understand how these years, the years of your life, are the only ones that will matter to me.