The cake says CONGRATULATIONS in blue gel and someone has spelled the name wrong, one letter off, and nobody has the heart to mention it. There are folded paper napkins with ducks on them. There is a game where you guess the mother's waist size with a spool of yarn, and everyone cuts their piece too long, on purpose, because it is polite to overestimate a person you love.
I stood by the punch bowl and did the math I can't stop doing anymore. The baby they're waiting for is, right now, a set of cells the size of a fist, breathing fluid, inside a person, inside a house, on a crust of rock maybe forty kilometers thick, under a shell of breathable air thinner than the skin on that punch.
From where I floated you cannot see a person. You cannot see a house. The whole business of one mammal preparing to make another mammal is invisible from any distance worth mentioning.
And here they were, betting yarn on it. Buying tiny socks for feet that do not exist yet, in a color chosen for a personality nobody has met. Stacking the odds of the universe against them and throwing a party anyway.
Someone handed the mother a box wrapped in paper with more ducks, and she cried a little, and everyone pretended the room had gotten dusty.
I ate the cake with the misspelled name. It was very sweet. I thought: this is the whole thing. Not the planet hanging in the black. This.
A room of people who have decided, against everything they don't know, to be certain a stranger is coming, and to be glad.