Don’t Blink

On loving first, and loving from afar

Two nights ago, I cried over a photograph of my nephew as a toddler.

I don’t know who took it. I only know that I stared at it longer than necessary. The cheekiness in his smile. The way children look at the world before they understand what it can do.

I sent it to him.

He is a shy teenager now. Taller. Hesitant with his words.

I wrote:

I remember you a lot as a child. You are one of the great sources of happiness in my life, even if I don’t say it.

I don’t know if he understood the weight of my disclosure. Teenagers rarely respond to tenderness the way we imagine. But I needed to send it.

Last week in Glasgow, I sat in a dark cinema watching The President’s Cake. I had not expected to leave the cinema undone.

There is a scene near the end. A classroom. A bombing. The little girl and her friend hide under their desks. The walls shake. Dust falls. The friend whispers, ‘Let’s play a game. Don’t blink.’ As if stillness could stop the sky from breaking.

I cried in a way I haven’t cried in public before.

Not discreet tears. Not dignified ones.

I cried because children should not have to invent games to survive adult decisions.

I cried because fear has a particular look on a child’s face: wide but contained, as if they are trying to be brave for someone older.

And I cried because she reminded me of a girl I once met while volunteering with refugee children in Europe. She was quiet. Observant. She had the same watchful eyes. The same ability to sit still when everything inside her must have been moving.

I remember thinking then: children learn composure too early.

I thought of her recently. When my family described the sounds above their city, I understood again how the body of a child holds what it cannot yet name.

When I think about my nephew now, I think about how easily the world can enter a child’s life without permission. How quickly innocence becomes awareness.

There are nights when I imagine the sky above people I love — the sound outside their windows, the light flickering against familiar walls. I imagine them sitting at dinner, or scrolling through their phones, or trying to sleep — while somewhere decisions are being made in rooms far away.

Children live inside those decisions.

They don’t vote for them.

They don’t design them.

They simply adapt.

And yet, love has its own quiet logic.

When my nephew was four or five, he asked me why I loved him so much.

The question startled me. Children rarely question love — they assume it.

I told him the truth. That during the first week of his life, he slept on my chest almost every night. I was helping his mother after she gave birth, and somewhere between those quiet hours and the weight of his small body rising and falling against mine, I fell in love with him.

That same week, his mother called me laughing and confused. She had asked him why he loved his auntie so much. His answer was simple:

“Because she loved me first.”

She didn’t understand what he meant. I did.

He meant that I loved him before he could remember being loved. And that something in him must have felt it.

There was a time in my life when I was trying to rebuild myself. I had read somewhere that when fear begins to take over, you should bring to mind the face of someone you love. I tried it once, in a moment when everything felt fragile.

His face as it was then.

And something shifted.

I don’t know if he knows this, but there were days when remembering him steadied me. Days when his existence was enough to stop me from spiraling.

Children grow inside decisions they never made.

But sometimes, without knowing it, they rescue us from them too.