You used to wake up crying.

Sitting up in the dark, I’d rub your shoulders until you laid down again. Sometimes, I’d hear you take a couple of deep breaths before slipping back into your dreams where they were always leaving you.

Awake, you could barely remember your mother’s face but in your sleep, it was her curly blonde hair that Christmas when you were two that brought you to tears, or sometimes the Vietnamese surgeon’s long, thin braid trailing out of her scrub cap while her scalpel sliced through flesh like warm butter.

You held onto me in your sleep back then, too: an arm across my chest with your hand clasped around my shoulder, your leg thrown across my waist; like I might float away in your sleep and you’d open your eyes after dreaming about losing her again and find yourself alone.

When I was little, sometimes my mom would point out small boys with wrinkles on the back of their scalps: “see his head? His mom didn’t hold him enough when he was a baby. Only babies who never got picked up have wrinkly heads like that.”

On the nights when you fell asleep with your back to me, I’d look at the wrinkles on the back of your scalp and try to focus my dreams on walking fast enough to arrive in Holly Grove in 1987 before the feeling of your fingers letting go of my shoulder pulled me back into my body in the morning.

Some nights I made it as far as Metairie; once I walked so fast that I set foot in Holly Grove in 1995 and a woman standing on a covered porch in front of a pink house told me that last she heard, you were already off to Alaska. I had just a moment to wipe the humid-sticky hair off my sweating forehead before I was called back, blinking slowly at the ceiling fan.

Even now (even still), I wake up with sore feet from running back in time in my dreams. I’ve never been fast enough to traverse the 35 years and 500 miles to pick you up out of your bassinet and hold a warm hand to the back of your still smooth head before morning.

And maybe the point is that it’s not work anyone else can do for you. But if I can, I will.

When I do, we’ll wake up side by side in your pink sheets; your hand on my shoulder, your leg on across my waist and you’ll be without your cutis veriticis gyrata. And this time, you’d stay.