Directions was written after attending a Fun with Dad event with Dylan. At one point during the session, I watched a boy with Down syndrome lead his father through a blindfolded obstacle course in a hall. The boy went first, masked, guided by his father's words. Then they swapped.
The boy stumbled. Of course he did. He was a child playing a game.
But I couldn't stop thinking about what it might look like if he hadn't. If there was a child for whom the mask changed nothing — who moved through the dark without hesitation, who had long ago learned to navigate a world that wasn't built for him. I started imagining a blind child. The mask strapped across eyes that already knew the dark. The father stumbling where his son did not. The father realising, too late, that he was never really the one in front.
The poem is not what I saw. The boy stumbled, and that was enough — enough to make me wonder what it means to watch someone navigate a world that asks more of them than it asks of you, and still show up, still play, still laugh at the end.
That is what I saw. The poem is what I couldn't let go of.