Polishing Her Edges

I’m looking at her, really looking at her for the first time in a long while. She’s curled up in the corner of the couch, her increasingly longer legs tucked under her.

She’s got the greatest profile, I think to myself. There’s a little wrinkle in her brow as she concentrates. She’s got her tablet propped up next to her and her artist’s fingers are gripping the charcoal pencil as it strokes across the page. She’s got a slight upturn to her mouth and that’s when it strikes me.

I have no idea what’s going on in her mind right now. Somehow, along the way, she’s grown up and is no longer the transparent little soul she once was.

Make no mistake, I know my mirror image daughter down to her bones. But the mirror has cracked a tad. She’s on her way to shattering it and uncovering her own independent image behind it.

So I’m just here watching her create this anime wolf hybrid girl on the page and sitting in a moment of quiet contemplation. A moment I want desperately to interrupt to get inside her head. But that knowing down to the bones part of me reminds me that for this moment I need to just take it in.

And admire that my girl is polishing her edges. She’s smoothing out the cracks in that image as she breaks through.

At her core she will always be who she’s set the foundation to be.