She has been holding him for two hours and her arm has gone numb, and she keeps flexing her fingers under his weight, wincing, shifting him an inch, and it is the finest thing I have ever watched.
He is doing almost nothing. That is the secret nobody tells you until it is too late. He curls one impossible hand around her thumb, not because he knows it is her thumb, only because it is there and warm and his fingers close on warm things. His whole face works through a weather system of frowns and yawns and that startled fling of both arms when the world tilts.
She watches every one. She has not looked at the glowing rectangle in two hours. I would give the entire quiet width of where I am now for two hours where I forgot the rectangle existed.
She is complaining, softly, that her back hurts and she cannot reach her tea and it has gone cold. Cold tea. Oh, to have tea go cold on me. To have a back that hurts from bearing something I love. She thinks these are the inconveniences she must endure to reach the good part.
She has not understood yet that this is the good part, the pins and needles and the dead arm and the cold tea, the whole heavy ordinary miracle of being a body that holds another body.
Put him down when you must. Rub your arm. Drink the next cup warm.
But feel it, the ache in your shoulder tonight. That is him. That is you.
That is the weight of being here at all.