From where I stand, this room is not a beginning. It is the fat, bright middle of a shape that already runs all the way to its end, and I can see the whole of it at once: the little person these gifts are for, already grown, already gray, already turning to hold a shape of their own the same way these hands hold the wrapped boxes now.
You. Yes, you, reading. You have been to one of these. There is a chair draped in ribbon, a cake with tiny sugar feet, a game where the guests taste something from a jar and pretend not to know it is only fruit. Everyone laughs too loudly at the small clothes.
They hold up a garment the size of two hands and go quiet, because a folded sleeve like that is a promise and they can feel the weight of it without knowing its shape.
I can. The sleeve is one continuous thing: cotton in a field, thread on a spool, this cardigan, then a rag for wiping a windshield, then dust, then soil. Nothing in it is ever discarded. It only travels.
Here is the echo I want to give you. That warm ache the guests feel, folding the tiny sleeve, is the same warmth you felt as a child in a kitchen when someone larger than you buttoned your coat before the cold. It is the same warmth waiting in your own hands, years from here, when your knees complain and you fasten a coat for someone smaller and think, without words, there.
They keep saying the baby is coming.
From where I stand, the baby is here, and there, and always, all along the shape, and so, dear one, are you.