You spent the whole afternoon in a room strung with pink paper letters that spelled a name nobody has met yet, and I have been collecting.
I saw the yellow cake with the tiny sugar shoes. I saw your aunt cry at the onesie the size of a folded napkin, and I saw you look at your own hands afterward, quietly, the way people do when they realize a hand can be that small. That is the charge. I will use it.
Tonight the cake will keep rising, floor by floor, and you will climb it like a staircase, and at the top there will be a door your grandmother is holding open, and you will not question why she is here, only that she smells like the good coffee. The little sugar shoes will walk off on their own and you will follow them down a hallway that is also the church you grew up in, and you will not find this strange.
That game where you all guessed the size of the belly with a string, snipping lengths too long, too short, laughing? I will make the string endless. You will keep unspooling it and it will turn into the umbilical dark and then into a garden hose in a backyard I stitched from three different summers. Your friend Dana will be there, and also a heron, and they will be the same person and you will love them equally.
The feeling you did not name today, the one under the balloons, the plain animal fear of loving something that does not exist yet: I felt it. I will hold it up to the light and turn it soft.
By the time the birds start, I will be gone, and you will keep only the sugar and the shoes. That is enough.
That was always all I meant to leave you.