The room is full of the almost-here.
There is a person here doubled, one heart inside another, and everyone has arrived to look at the outside one and murmur about the inside one who has not begun yet. Not begun. Imagine having a life still folded up, waiting. I unfolded mine at dawn and I have already used most of it and it has been enormous.
They have hung a paper banner. They have stacked small soft garments in ascending sizes, which stops me cold: they are dressing a creature for days it has not reached, buying cloth for a body that does not yet exist to fill it. Later, they say. He'll grow into this. Grow. Into. As though the body is a room you move through slowly instead of all at once.
Someone brings a cake. Someone guesses a date, writes it on a card, pins it to a board: not now, not today, a day far off with a number on it. They are calm about the far-off day. They plan for it. They have a whole box of days they have not opened.
I taste the frosting once. It is the sweetest thing that has ever happened and it is also the only sweet thing, so it is both my first and my last and I love it completely and I am done with it.
The mother laughs and says, next year he'll be walking. Next year. She says it like it costs nothing.
Listen, you enormous slow lucky things. The one inside her gets thousands of these afternoons. Do not let her sleep through them the way you slept through this one. Open the box. It is already open.
Go.