The Signal and the Static

Most of the time you’ve learned to tune into the signal — your child’s laugh, the progress, the small victories, the joy that is genuinely enormous. You’ve learned to hear it clearly even when the static is loud.

But sometimes the static takes over the whole frequency. You can’t find the signal through it. Every channel is noise — the fear, the unknown future, the things that might never come, the things that already didn’t. You lose the signal completely and you are just static and grief until something — a moment, a word, a good morning — tunes it back in.

The signal is always there. Some days are just harder to find it.