Your children are not your children. They are the sons and

Host: The evening was still, painted in a soft haze of sunset gold and dust. The air held that quiet sorrow particular to endings — a school bell in the distance, a dog barking, the smell of rain that never quite came. On the rooftop of an old apartment building, two figures sat — Jack, his grey eyes lost in the dying light, and Jeeny, holding a small photo album against her chest.

Below them, the city breathed — children shouting, mothers calling, the world humming its everyday music. But up here, there was only silence, broken occasionally by the faint whirr of a ceiling fan from an open window.

Host: The wind shifted, carrying a smell of burning incense and milk from a nearby temple. It was the smell of memory — warm, holy, and painfully human.

Jeeny: quietly “Khalil Gibran once wrote — ‘Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They came through you but not from you, and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.’”

Jack: “I’ve always thought that was cruel.” He lit a cigarette, his voice rough, almost bitter. “To say a parent doesn’t own their child — what does that even mean? You raise them, feed them, break yourself to keep them alive, and then someone tells you they don’t belong to you.”

Jeeny: “It’s not cruelty, Jack. It’s surrender. Gibran wasn’t denying the bond — he was freeing it. He meant that love isn’t possession. It’s passage.”

Host: The sun slipped lower, a deep orange bleeding into blue, like the sky was learning to let go of its own light.

Jack: “Passage sounds poetic. But parents don’t think like poets. They think like people who’ve spent half their life trying not to lose what they love.”

Jeeny: “Maybe that’s the tragedy — we confuse love with ownership. We hold so tight that what we love forgets how to breathe.”

Jack: “You sound like you’re talking from experience.”

Jeeny: nodding “I am. My mother still calls me every night to ask what I ate, who I met, if I’m alone. She says it’s love, but sometimes it feels like fear — the fear of losing control.”

Jack: “Maybe that’s not fear, Jeeny. Maybe it’s emptiness. Parents live for their children — when those children walk away, what’s left?”

Host: The wind picked up, fluttering the pages of the photo album in Jeeny’s lap. The photos caught the light — a little girl running barefoot, a man’s hand holding hers, a woman smiling through tears.

Jeeny: “What’s left? Life, Jack. The same Life that came through them to us. The same one that will move through us someday, through others. That’s what Gibran meant — children are not ours, they are Life’s. We’re just the bridges.”

Jack: “Bridges break, Jeeny. Parents die. And sometimes, children don’t cross back.”

Jeeny: “Then maybe that’s the point — we’re not supposed to be crossed back to. We’re meant to let them go where we can’t follow.”

Host: A long pause. Jack stared at the horizon, where the last trace of sunlight was slipping behind the buildings, the edges glowing, as if the day itself was reluctant to end.

Jack: “You know… when my father died, I didn’t cry. Not for weeks. I just felt… untethered. Like a string that suddenly realized it had no kite. And I think — I think maybe he felt the same way when I left home at eighteen. Maybe that’s the circle, huh? Parents learn loss first; children learn it later.”

Jeeny: “Yes. But the difference is — parents mistake that loss for betrayal. Children mistake it for freedom.”

Jack: “So both are wrong.”

Jeeny: “No. Both are human.”

Host: The sound of laughter drifted up from the street — a father chasing a child, the child’s voice bright and wild, like something untouched by understanding. Jack’s eyes softened, his hand trembling slightly as he put out his cigarette.

Jack: “I don’t think I could ever have a kid. I wouldn’t know how to love without holding on too tight.”

Jeeny: “Maybe you wouldn’t have to. You’d just have to love with both hands open. To hold, not to cage.”

Jack: “That’s easy for you to say. You’ve never been a parent.”

Jeeny: “No, but I’ve been a daughter. And I’ve watched my parents carry their love like a burden they didn’t know how to set down. I’ve seen how love can become a prison — built out of care, sealed with guilt.”

Jack: “So what’s the right way to love, then?”

Jeeny: “The way the sky loves the birds. It gives them room to fly — and never asks them to return.”

Host: The silence after that was not emptiness but weight — the kind that only truth carries. The city lights began to glow, one by one, like small witnesses to the conversation.

Jack: “You know what’s strange? When I think about my mother, I still feel like a child. Doesn’t matter that I’m thirty-five, doesn’t matter how far I go. Some part of me is still trying to earn her blessing.”

Jeeny: “That’s because love leaves a shape in us. The child remains — not because we’re weak, but because that shape never closes. Maybe that’s what eternity is — the echo of one generation inside another.”

Jack: “You really believe we belong to Life, not each other?”

Jeeny: “Yes. Because belonging to Life means nothing is ever lost. We don’t end — we just transform. Gibran wasn’t being cruel, Jack — he was being merciful. He was reminding us that love isn’t meant to possess. It’s meant to witness.”

Host: The photo album slipped from Jeeny’s lap and fell open on the concrete floor. A photo fluttered loose — a child’s face, all light and laughter, caught mid-motion. Jack picked it up, studied it, then handed it back.

Jack: “She looks happy.”

Jeeny: “She was. Before she learned that love could feel like obligation.”

Jack: quietly “And now?”

Jeeny: “Now she’s learning that it can also feel like release.”

Host: The wind softened, and the sky, now a deep indigo, spread wide above them. The city below glimmered — a constellation of lights, each one a story, each story a child of Life’s endless longing.

Jack: “You know, maybe that’s what makes being human so painful. We want to keep everything that was only ever meant to pass through us.”

Jeeny: “And maybe that’s what makes it beautiful — that we love anyway.”

Host: The camera pulled back, showing the two figures on the rooftop — small, still, silhouetted against the vast night. The city hum below, the sky eternal above.

The photo album lay open between them, its pages fluttering like wings in the wind.

Host: And as the scene faded, Gibran’s words seemed to breathe through the air itself —
that life is not ours to own,
that love is not a chain,
and that to let someone go is not to lose them,
but to return them to the longing from which they came.