One morning, Liz Petrone’s son burst into tears as he left her arms to board the school bus. Although the bus was driving away, Petrone could see that her son was crying, so she reached out to him and tried to share a gesture that would give him some reassurance of her undying love.
The next morning, we sat at the bus stop together, and I pulled a pen from my coat pocket,” she wrote on Facebook. “I grabbed his wrist, kissed the blue of his veins where the blood we share flows through his veins and drew this heart.”
This time, before she let her son board the bus, she gave him a few words of wisdom that she hoped he could live by. “‘I know it’s hard sometimes out there,’ I told him as the bus pulled up to take him away. I want you to look at this heart every time. It feels like too much.
I want you to look, and I want you to remember that no matter what happens out there, someone is here waiting for you to come home. Someone loves you.’ He crossed the road, climbed the bus steps, and I watched this time as his face appeared in the window.”
She continued, “I waited for him to see me, to smile or wave or even to cry, but he never even looked at me. Instead, he looked at his wrist. Know it’s hard out there a lot of the time for a lot of us. I know the holidays can amplify that, and so can the cold, and so can the dark.
