Oh, little girl. What are you thinking about now? Your feet.

Well, I'll just stick them under my shirt, now what are you thinking about? Still your feet. You're kicking them under my shirt and watching the cloth of my button-up rise and fall. Now you're looking at my phone, and now you're kicking again. little girl, you are a wild one. Like something from a book I read, though far sweeter.

"My hands are interesting", you say, "And maybe if I kick you enough, I can stand." Standing is the most fun to you, and you know the kicking does not hurt me. And when you stand, you look at me, and I hold your hands, and you smile, and you laugh, and I laugh. You stomp happily as I hold you up under your arms, and you give me a warrior cry with a wry smile, ready for life, ready to stand, ready for battle! And then your legs give out and you slide back down safely onto my legs, raised to a little hill to sit you up and look at me. And we look at each other, both somehow tired, even though it looks as if we didn't do much, but oh the fun we have. And have had. Oh, my darling, I wish I didn't have to leave you now.

I have been with you for half your life now, though compared to mine, that has only been a blink in the eye of a lifetime, a spec of dust in the sea of what will be, and what was. I wonder some days if two months seems like twenty years to you, the time that I have lived. I wonder if the days are just as long or longer. I know mine will become endless when I have to leave you. Dear girl, I hope you are not sad, but remember and smile when I come back. Christmas, or spring, your birthday, when the classes I must return to me let me go again to return to you, my dear, instead. A far greater lesson in the making. A million adventures to be had and an endless world to discover.

It won't be so sad, little girl. I will move closer to you to be there, and you may forget to be sad and only smile when I come back. A few hundred miles is almost too much to take, now that I know you, but there are so many yous to know, so many versions that neither of us has seen yet. Not us, or the world, so I must get used to leaving you my dear, and look forward to the greeting whoever you shall be. And I will think about who that girl will be often, at least once a day. A far better medicine to take to lift the soul.

I will come back again, to see you, to write about, to take too many pictures, and wonder at how your laugh has changed. Become bigger, become brighter, fuller and so much more filled with you and the intentions you couldn't display as an infant, kicking wildly and just beginning to know just how far you could make yourself be heard. Your laugh ringing out into every room of the house. I will smile in wonder at how such a little thing, such a perfect, little beautiful thing that never once existed before now exists in my arms and can do so many amazing things. No, it won't be so sad. Because I will always come back to you, my dear. Though this trip has been long, and how I wish it were longer, if I keep busy, wasting time being productive, school as my shield and self-defense against my impatient mind, then the time will fly out of my hands like the loose papers I treck on a winter's day from my dorm to my teachers. And then, I will see you again.

No, it is not goobye, my dear. It is never goobye. There is no such thing, not with me, and not with you. This, my Iris, is only a small nap, a little rest, to cose your eyes, and dream of what we will do next. And then, I will be there.