I have wanted this one his whole first hour. Seven pounds and a little more, warm, folded, entirely mine to hold, though the human woman holds him too, and I hold her, and I hold the chair beneath her, and I hold the whole heavy tired weight of the building around them.
He does not brace. This is the thing I notice first. Everyone I hold learns, eventually, to hold back a little, to stiffen against me, to keep something in reserve. He has learned nothing yet. He gives me all of him at once. When the woman's arm moves, his head lolls after it, complete, trusting, boneless, the way a thing falls when it has never once been dropped.
She is crying, and she tells the man in the corner that her heart is so full it is heavy. I checked. Her heart weighs what a heart weighs, three hundred grams, no more than yesterday, and yet she leans as though I have doubled it. I do not understand what has been added. Whatever it is, it is not mine to hold. It is hers.
I hold the tears down her cheeks. I hold the coffee going cold, untouched, on the tray. I hold the moon over the parking lot, patient, keeping its distance the way I asked.
And I hold him. He weighs almost nothing. It is the easiest work I have ever been given, and I will do it every second of every year that follows, through the walking and the falling and the standing back up, through all the days he forgets I am here at all.
He does not know my name. He will spend his life pushing off from me and never once thank me. That is all right.
I have him.
I do not let go.