Written by the Māori writer Nadine Anne Hura and first published in Te Whē,“Koru” is lush with Māori words that gather and swell as the narrative progresses. These words have an emotional impact regardless of a reader’s familiarity with the language, and they render the text rich with meaning.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

I love our tikanga. I love the way there is space for us to come and go, to leave and return. So much is familiar about this journey. So much is strange. We are not the same people, he and I. My hands move in rhythms they know: stitching his name into his trousers, locating laundry bags to prevent lost socks, pulling the red suitcase out from under the bed. A different bed, a different house. On this day four years ago, I hadn’t slept at all. When the first light of day nudged at the edge of dreams, I was already awake, alert, readying myself.

Today I awoke with the alarm. Calm and easy with it. He’s leaving, my puku said. He’ll go away, and he’ll come back. That’s how this story goes. What is life but a series of lessons in holding on fiercely and letting go gently?

Four years ago, he was thirteen, and his dad was in the driver’s seat. Today he is seventeen and licensed. He sits behind the wheel with his hands at ten and two, just like his dad. He casts a similar shadow, tall and slim with an angular jaw. Whistles just like him too. “Only better,” he says with a wink and a grin. Sometimes I do a double take and need to look away. He is not his father. I know this, but I think it takes a while for men to see it for themselves, to really reckon with that knowledge and all the complicated knots it ties them in. Walking in your father’s shadow is not the same as being like him.

It’s hot again. The same cloudless Manawatū sky stretches ahead of us. The same flat-packed plains slip beneath the wheels: Ōhau, Shannon, Ōpiki, Feilding. Then, finally, the tree-lined driveway of Hato Pāora College — exactly the same as we left it two and a half years ago, when our boy decided he’d had enough and didn’t want to go back.

We gather at the waharoa and wait for the karanga. We swell and then move as one. Under the white marquee on the marae ātea, it is quiet enough to hear the rapid thrum of a hundred heartbeats.

Kia kaha te wiriwiri. Kia kaha te tangi.

This time, I’m prepared for the long speeches. I anticipate the rise and fall of the words as they command our attention before rippling through with laughter. I’ve brought my knitting: a lace shawl in one bag and a tāniko hat in another. This is not insignificant. Four years ago, I could barely tell a knit from a purl. Now I’m doing color work without looking at my needles. It’s amazing how far we can travel in such a brief amount of time. The blanket my boy packed this morning is the first thing I ever knitted to completion.

During his first year at Hato Pāora, it grew a thin layer of fluff, and the holes stretched and sagged, and the color began to drain away. I suppose that’s what happened to him, in a way. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

He was never ashamed of his blanket. Not the first time he unpacked it inside the clamoring year nine dorm. Not ever. A mother can sacrifice a lot for simple acknowledgments like that. Some of the most important things we say to the people we love are wordless.

In the early days, I heard a lot of his stories firsthand. He used to tell me everything — at least, I let myself believe he did. I would listen and then write it all down later, convinced that his escapades could one day become the subject of a Taika film; all I’d need to do was write a transcript and change the names. In time, I learned that all old boys tell different versions of these same stories. It’s part of a shared language that binds them together.

Sometimes I’d drive the two hours to Feilding from Porirua to bring him home on weekend leave, just to have a few hours alone with him. Those long, straight roads had a way of coaxing the stories out of him. It’s always been this way with us. He spills, I listen. It makes us sound close and tight, and we are, but as with all mother-and-son relationships, you can look at the picture from many angles. We once saw a family therapist together, and the counselor remarked on our openness with each other. He said we clearly loved each other a lot. His words cut through me because no matter how much my boy and I yelled and argued, what the counselor said was true. Is it always possible to tell when fighting for someone you love warps into a fight against everything you don’t want to lose? When he was a baby, I struggled to let him out of my sight. Perhaps that’s why he needs to leave, and has always needed to leave. It’s not just his father’s shadow he walks in.

During his second year, in 2017, the original homestead of Hato Pāora was demolished. Emotions surged, and there was a brief campaign by the old boys to save the building called Īhaka. The school insisted that it was too late. The walls were rotting, and the roof was crumbling. The building was dangerous, the board of trustees said. It was a well-known rite of passage for year nines to sneak out of their dorm and climb the stairs in the dark to the glass-domed tower at the top of the house and carve their names into the walls. It was only a matter of time, the school said, before someone got hurt.

The day Īhaka was signed over to the demolishers, I drove up with a photographer planning to write a story for the school yearbook. There was a service outside the front steps, and a small group of people showed up. We were given face masks and invited to walk through as the whare was blessed and let go. As we made our way around the rooms in single file, fingers to peeling paint, I saw with my own eyes what the school had been saying. It was too late to speak of intervention. Apart from the feral cats that peered at us from beneath cracked floorboards, there was no life to speak of. Scattered hymnals lay on windowsills; boxes of student files cascaded from cabinets with broken hinges. It was as if everybody had left suddenly in the middle of the night. In one dorm, there was a pile of mismatched rugby boots. Sinister drip stains in the peach-colored bathroom told us to stay away. You could see Īhaka’s former beauty in the chandeliers and stained-glass windows, but not all of what hung around was good. He leaned dreamlike into the past, stirring memories and voices in the dust as we proceeded. Inside the glass dome high above the building, I searched the crowded, valiant walls and found my son’s name etched lightly into the paint. I ran my fingertips across it and told no one.

I remember very clearly the day my boy said he didn’t want to go back. It was the winter of his second year, when the ground in Feilding freezes over and the dark sky tucks in close and cuts the days short. It was his birthday, and he was coming home on leave. I could feel something different about him the moment he got in the car. I didn’t want to hear what I knew he was going to say, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that a part of me leapt with joy when he said he wanted to come home and live with me. With me. Was it wrong? Was it selfish? Do I regret it? Should I have packed him off back to school on Sunday and left him there against his will? God knows it’s been done by plenty of parents before me.

In the end I didn’t have it in me. I would have had to push him away, and I hadn’t even learned how to properly let him go. When we talk about it now, I say that he was too strong-willed for me, and he does not dispute it, but perhaps there is room to admit that I was afraid. Afraid of everything I couldn’t control. Things at home were unraveling so swiftly and so unpredictably that it was almost a reflex to reach out and pull my children close. How could I expect my son to turn around and lope back to the cold dorm when all he knew was changing? I kept saying that everything was fine and that things were going to be okay, but my eyes said something else.

Returning to Hato Pāora to collect his things and empty his locker sucked in that way that divorce sucks. None of the boys asked questions. They didn’t need to. Boys come and go from kura all the time. Outside the gym, in a pool of yellow light, the boys sent him off with a haka that I filmed from a distance on my phone — a video that, to this day, my boy has never wanted to watch.

The years that followed were not easy. For months he stayed inside his room with the curtains drawn and the bed unmade. He slept through the days and gamed through the night. His new, local school began leaving messages about his falling attendance.

I knew he was lost, but I didn’t know how to reach him. One night, after midnight, we crossed paths in the hallway. He spontaneously stepped into my arms without a word and stayed there, hugging me in the dark for seconds stretching into minutes. When he pulled away, he looked down at me and said with a clarity that took my breath away, “Why is it that I’m taller than you now, but whenever I hug you, I still feel like a little boy?”

There were many times I asked if he wanted to go back to Hato Pāora, but the answer was always the same. He couldn’t. It was too late. Too much time had passed.

When the year twelve prize-giving came around in November, I encouraged him to go and tautoko his mates moving into their final year. I couldn’t get time off work, so we arranged for him to go with another whānau. Before he left, I asked if he was feeling okay. He looked at me and frowned. “Why wouldn’t I be?” He patted me on my shoulder and left through the door, but when he came back, he was quiet. Maybe it was then when he started to change his mind.

A few weeks after the prize-giving, my boy wrote a cryptic Facebook post that worried me and everyone who read it. My mind was still fresh with memories of a tangi to farewell a boy of the same age the previous month. For two days, I watched as teenage boys entered the wharenui, backlit with sunshine, to crouch beside the darkened coffin. I was struck by the awkwardness of their folded legs in that small space and by their acute awareness that the bro couldn’t get up and greet them, shoulder to shoulder, in the briefest, most beautiful expression of masculine aroha. As with the campaign to save Īhaka, those left behind hauled blame and responsibility onto their shoulders. The doubt was crushing. If only. If only the right person at the right time had been there to say, “I love you, bro. If you left this world, I’d be broken. Whatever you need, just say the word.”

By the time my boy next checked his phone, it was full of messages from the boys. He rang me straightaway. His voice was distant but clear. “I’m sorry, Mum,” he said.

I think that’s the moment I knew he would go back.

The morning of the pōwhiri, I sat in the passenger seat, getting used to the feeling of not being in control. Practicing a looser grip. If I’d been driving, I don’t think I would have seen Taane sitting in the Ōtaki bus shelter as we cruised through town, but my boy had slept next to him for so many nights in the dorm, he would have recognized him anywhere. He pulled the car over to jump out, and they greeted each other in the middle of the street with clasped hands and smiles, shoulder to shoulder. I got out and watched them from a distance. I thought of all the stories and all the laughs I’d heard over the years. Taane wasn’t in his number ones; he wasn’t going back. I had so many questions, but I knew not to ask. Boys come and go from kura all the time.

The first time my boy crossed the marae ātea at Hato Pāora, he had walked alone. This time I stood beside him; or, more accurately, he strode ahead of me, and I dropped into his shadow. Last time I didn’t cry; this time I let the tears fall without shame. I watched him take his place among the boys, unfurling away from me, head up and shoulders back, singing the words to songs he’d never forgotten. My mother leaned over and said, “Gosh, he looks so at home there, doesn’t he?” And I nodded, because I know how this story goes. It’s not unknown. The old Western adage that we can never go back isn’t true. We are endlessly returning. We leave the people and places we know, but like the koru, all of our journeys are essentially inward, so we are never really lost.

“Koru,” written by Nadine Anne Hura and originally published in Te Whē, which describes itself as “a bilingual journal showcasing writings of Māori writers in New Zealand.”