For Laya
You were born on the day that I got my first job. When I called to let my mom know I'd gotten there alive, I could hear the groans of your mother in the background, escalating smoothly into the screams of a woman whose body could no longer contain you. I hurried through the interview with her shrieks echoing through my head, reverberating images of alien infants with too-big heads and spindly limbs, of women's sexes being ripped to pieces, of blood and gore and breastmilk.
I can't remember anything they asked me. if they hadn't called me back, I would never have shown up, never spent the next nine months learning people and how they work, and how to work. I would never have grown as I did, fuller, more than I was on my own.
I remember holding you when your age was measured in hours, and your face flicked through more emotions than I could show in a whole week. I remember how impossibly small your fingers were, your nail no more than a ghost of a thought--and yet you held my finger like it was warmth, breath, knowledge and pleasure and everything you would ever need from this life. You slept in the crook of my arm--my arm, small and weak, but supporting this tiny being of flesh and hope. You shone like starlight in your sleep, dreamed dreams of everything you had yet to learn and all that I had forgotten. You were the smallest live thing I had ever touched, ever smelled, ever seen. And you were born so much bigger than me.
You were born on the day that I got my first job. When I called to let my mom know I'd gotten there alive, I could hear the groans of your mother in the background, escalating smoothly into the screams of a woman whose body could no longer contain you. I hurried through the interview with her shrieks echoing through my head, reverberating images of alien infants with too-big heads and spindly limbs, of women's sexes being ripped to pieces, of blood and gore and breastmilk.
I can't remember anything they asked me. if they hadn't called me back, I would never have shown up, never spent the next nine months learning people and how they work, and how to work. I would never have grown as I did, fuller, more than I was on my own.
I remember holding you when your age was measured in hours, and your face flicked through more emotions than I could show in a whole week. I remember how impossibly small your fingers were, your nail no more than a ghost of a thought--and yet you held my finger like it was warmth, breath, knowledge and pleasure and everything you would ever need from this life. You slept in the crook of my arm--my arm, small and weak, but supporting this tiny being of flesh and hope. You shone like starlight in your sleep, dreamed dreams of everything you had yet to learn and all that I had forgotten. You were the smallest live thing I had ever touched, ever smelled, ever seen. And you were born so much bigger than me.