The way this enormous soft creature holds the small new one against its chest, swaying, swaying, going nowhere at all: I could watch this until the light goes, and I intend to.
The new one has never seen light before. Neither have I, of course, but I understood at once what to do with it. The new one is baffled. Its hands open and close on nothing, grasping for a branch that was never there. It has a smell like warm rain. The big creature keeps pressing its face to the top of the small head and breathing in, as if it too has only one chance at this and knows it.
Then it says the thing that stops me midair.
It says she will do this every night. It says tomorrow the small one will be bigger. Bigger. As though the creature is not finished, as though there is a whole unmet version of it queued behind this one. And the big creature says it tired, blinking, half asleep, calling this endless unrepeatable miracle a routine, a two a.m., a phase.
A phase. Something you pass through on the way to another thing.
I do not have a way to another thing. I have this: the sway, the small closing hands, the smell of rain, the light draining gold to grey at the window while the two of them breathe in the same rhythm. It is the whole of my evening and it is enough, it is a feast, it is everything that has ever happened.
You who get the thousand nights of this: do not sleep through the one you are in. Breathe her in. Breathe her in again. You are allowed to say again.
I would give my only day to say it once.