When I tell people that my son has been diagnosed on the Autistic spectrum, they look at me with pity. They say, I’m so sorry, with the sadness we reserve for the dead. Conversations take on the tone of funeral dirges. I do not fault people. I am familiar with grief.

Will my son have a best friend, go to prom, obtain a college degree, live on his own, love his job, get married, become a dad?

I do not have these answers. Do any of us? I think that there are better questions.

Will my son laugh? Will he be happy? Does he love?

I love you, Momma. I love you like a volcano. You are beautiful, Momma. Your hair smells like love and sunshine. Sissy is my best friend. I want to be a pirate. Let’s be pirates, Momma? We will sail the angry seas. Yo, Ho! Yo, Ho! Can we go outside and play? I want to run. See how high I can jump? Let’s play tag, Momma? You’re it. I’m hiding. Come find me. Pick me up. Want to hear me sing my ABC’s? Spin me around, Momma. I’m gonna hug on you. I am going to wish on the stars for chocolate cake. I want to eat chocolate cake all the time. Eat cake with me, Momma. Let’s eat cake.

My son. He is. He does.

I need to write, but I fear my own words. I am also terrified of the words of others.

My son was evaluated last week. I sit here waiting for reports that may be filled with words like severe ADHD, maladaptive behavior, depression, OCD, high functioning Autism, or Aspergers.

I do not know what words will be attached to my son, or what may need to change based on his diagnosis. I do know that nothing will alter the love I have for my boy. He and I are constant. Still, I fear the words that others will use to write his future.

I am afraid, and I do not know how to write that fear as anything beautiful.  There is a total loss of poetry. I come here and attempt to write prose, but all I get is paralysis.

I believe that words are powerful. I need to use mine. I want to use mine. I truly do.  Instead, I sit here feeling completely impotent, unable to harness any words that are worthy.

We stand in the kitchen and speak words like hunger. My husband makes rice and tofu. I lift the simmering lid to taste. An argument bubbles to the surface that is and is not about how much garlic the recipe requires. It is the same argument we have been having for the past 10 years. It is an argument about expectations.

When David and I were first dating, we once walked home from town in a rainstorm. We took off our shoes and splashed in muddy puddles. We held hands impervious to the damp and the cold. We plotted our future. David was going to change the world. I was going to support him.

I was going to do such amazing things./I was going to simply stand quiet beside you? Both of us are incredulous.

Recently, we bought a house. A home is something we always dreamed we would make together. I am determined to be the one to paint the cabinets in our kitchen. I remind David about how I had to spend an entire day re-sanding the drips he left when he primed. I tell him that I do not trust that he can make the kitchen look the way I envisioned. I tell David that I do not want him to help me paint. He simply shrugs his shoulders, shakes his head, and moves to stand on the periphery. On the last cabinet, I make a huge mistake. I slap my paintbrush down. I am frustrated. David makes a joke about my perfectionism. He makes a joke that is really a gentle observation about us both. This is the shift. We are aware of what is happening. We hug each other in the kitchen. We lean our bodies against the wrecked cabinet. I am struck by the courage it takes for two people to love each other.

When my husband and I jumped those muddy puddles, we were different people. We were just kids. David was confident. I was diminutive. David had dreams. I was content to follow. We have evolved outside of those roles in the 14 years that we have been together. Some of our expectations, of what our life together would be, have not caught up to the adult versions of what we are. I believe the adult version of us has the potential to be better.

Let’s go back to the idea of rain. Gently. Gently. Everything is always falling.

We pull on raincoats and boots. We ignore the umbrellas. We dive in and out of raindrops as we race towards the car. My family drives across town in a storm to find the perfect pencil. David wants to draw pictures. He is at the wheel. I sit comfortably next to him. I am content in the passenger seat with a novel in my hand. There is laughter, and the sweet buzz my children naturally make. My son wants to know what colors combine to make his favorite. He wants to hold orange like a tiny fire in his hand. I tell him red and yellow. I make a mental note to buy him a book about Prometheus. My daughter stares out of her window, grateful. I lean my body towards her to listen. She whispers and I can only nod my head overwhelmed.  She says, Thank you, rain, for falling.

Marriage is hard. That is such a simple statement. A true statement. Sometimes marriage is too hard and a couple realizes that they need to walk away. I think that is incredibly brave. I can not imagine how hard it would be. I wonder how many of you have ever wondered if that couple might be you? Maybe you thought it in your head when disappointment built, or aloud in arguments where you strike out to hurt. If so, you are not alone.

I met my husband while in college. We started talking at a dorm room party. We have not stopped talking since that night. We moved in together within six months. We were young and relatively poor college kids, rolling up quarters to buy gas and the cigarettes we smoked back then. We laid on the rooftop. I use to ask him, What if?

What if a genie said he would grant you every wish you had, but it would mean that I had to lose a leg or be horribly disfigured? Would you do it?

Inside a silly game, we both knew what I was asking. There were things that made me afraid. What if you hurt me? What if you lie? What if you break my heart? What if I break yours? I wanted protection against the inevitable.

This year, my husband and I will be married for 10 years, together for over 14. In this space of time, I have broken my husband’s heart in ways both small and large.

Some would say that I am not an easy woman to love. I have thrown around the word divorce as a weapon. I have let my anxiety get in the way of my logic. I have pushed away my husband’s need for the simple intimacy of having me, his partner, look him square in the eyes. I have spent hours on the internet engaging with others when I should have been engaging with my husband. I have even wondered, in the very darkest of moments, if Dave was truly the one. If you knew my husband, what we have together, you would know that this is the most egregious fault. I am not proud.

14 years together. We are not poor. The roof is over our heads. The ground is under our feet. We construct and deconstruct our daily boundaries. We ask questions. We no longer play, outright, the game of, What if? Instead, we live it.

What can we do to make sure our children grow up healthy? If we buy the new house will it be something to make us happy, or a burden we can not afford? What are all the ways we can ask forgiveness for how we hurt each other? If we evolve separately, let us promise to remember that we love under the exact same stars?

I think that what and If might be what constitute a marriage. My marriage has been a series of what and if. It has also been about, Why? I used to constantly ask why does my husband stay with such a difficult woman? Why does he continue to love me so faithfully when I have made so many mistakes? Knowing Dave, he will answer for himself. He will come here and he will say sweet things because he is good and kind and whole in ways that I admire. I am lucky that way.

I do not know if we can ever truly explain, why. Sometimes we just are.

When my husband and I first met, I was unsure and insecure. For a long time, I thought that David saved me from myself, my loneliness, my pain. I have learned that another person can not fix the cracks, the fissures of self. I can take credit for that all on my own, even if I am still a work in progress.

There was a time when I could not see past all that David did for me, to realize that I do for him too. I note with pleasure the absence of space when my hand reaches out to find his. I am a really good listener. I fill our house with goofy laughter. I burn toast with grace. I mother with love and good intent, always, his two children. I am a devoted wife.

I am also a reflective enough wife to know that i have been selfish. Finding myself should not be about dismissing the person that I love. This is what I hope to be forgiven for.

My husband and I are beautifully bound. We fail in a million different ways on a daily basis. But add us up to sum, and we make it work in all the ways that count.

David, I love you. Then. Now. Always.

Last night, I read a post from a well-known male blogger* that made me confused. He wrote about being in high school, having a crush on a girl, being denied her affection. As I first read, I could relate. Who hasn’t wanted someone or some thing so badly they experienced anger when denied? I have. What happens, however, when anger spills over into action?

This particular blogger wrote about thrusting his hand between a young girl’s legs when he and she were both in high school. A girl he described as wearing a silk blouse and no bra. A girl that he desired. A girl that did not want him. While pushing himself unprovoked and uninvited between her most private space, he demanded, “Is this what you wanted?” The story ends with the girl in tears in the backseat of a car, and the blogger admitting his own actions were scary.

I wrote a private e-mail to this blogger and asked him why he shared the piece online. I wanted to know what his motivation was for publishing it. He replied by telling me he wrote the piece because it was true. This made me furious. Does truth automatically make something acceptable? If we write our dirty, hateful, secrets are we immediately made brave just by the telling? What sort of community are we if we heap an author with praise just because he or she sits down and writes about his or her own repulsive act? What sort of society are we when another blogger comments that the young scared girl in that car was not even a victim?

My head spun. I tasted bile in my mouth. I physically shook. I needed to step away, from that blogger, from Twitter, from my own head. I went to sleep. Upon waking up this morning, I realized something. I thought my anger came from wishing this blogger had written the piece with more remorse. Not true. It was not really about that blogger. What I really want is retribution for all women. I want every single man who has ever hurt a woman in a sexual way to spontaneously burst into flames right….about….NOW!

Am I angry? You bet I am. I think the question is why isn’t every person angry that violence still happens in small ways like the backseat of that car? What good is sorry, really? If the two men that took advantage of me, while I stumbled like a sloppy drunk in the snow, apologized for the bloody raw ache they left inside of me, would it make it better. Fuck! No!

This post is not about re-hashing my old wounds or stories. I’ve claimed my own status as a survivor. I do not need to go backwards even when there are posts and people that trigger the memories that propel me down the rabbit hole of my own history. I just need to make sense of why this particular post from this particular blogger had me so enraged. There has to be more than just the telling, his and mine. Simply writing it down is not enough. What do we learn from it?

Some of you who’ve been reading me for awhile might remember a story I told you about when I was younger. There was this cocky kid named Tommy who corned me on a deserted stairwell. He thrust his fingers uninvited and unwanted up my skirt. I was this shy, awkward, girl who had never been looked at much less touched by a boy. It was not what I wanted. It made me scared and confused. What I left out, when I previously told the story, was that three days after the stairwell incident happened Tommy asked me out. I said yes. Yes? It felt strange and scary but good to be wanted, even when the wanting part was done all wrong. Just writing those words brings back all the confusion I felt when holding the phone to my ear and saying yes to dating a boy who previously violated me. I never told Tommy that what he did that day on the stairs felt dirty, frightening, and wrong. I never spoke up when he broke up with me and spread untrue rumors about my body to the entire class. I never said a word. Silence is a weapon young girls and women are taught to use against themselves.

When I first read the post of that popular male bloggers, I felt the same type of conflict that I felt as the scared confused girl I once was. This post was written by a blogger I knew and generally liked. Someone I saw as gentle, dorky, kind. I never would have imagined that story being attached to his history. After reading the post, I could not help but question every thing I knew about him, start to read deeper and more sinisterly into what I thought were previously funny and harmless tweets. It made me wonder how much I could really trust any online “friendship.”

Knowing the blog world like I do, I knew the commendations for his “bravery” were coming. This is where the real tension was for me. I started to doubt myself. Who was I to be angry? Who was I to speak out in dissent? In fact, I wrote a tame first comment on the post where I danced around the issue of my own discomfort. That is what “good” girls are trained to do. Aren’t we? We don’t rock the damn proverbial boat. We never speak out. We maintain the shame in silence.

I think when women are silent we all become the metaphor of that girl in the backseat of the car with some angry guy trying to shove his fist between our thighs. I’m not going to let that happen to me. I can not worry that what I feel is not the acceptable response of the community at large. I can not worry about my own alienation. I will not be 12 years old again, crying in my childhood bedroom.

I think what that male blogger did to that girl was disgusting and wrong. I think some of his tweets are inappropriate. I hope that people read his post and they are shocked and disgusted too. I thought about linking him, but I do not want my writing to be about calling someone out. Even though, that is what I am essentially doing. This really is more about me trying to deal with the complexity of my own emotions.

I hope his post is read. I hope people actually discuss, disagree, determine their own feelings outside of the context of the group. We can learn from this, from anything, if we are willing to go further than just to write disclosure off as some brave act. I do not think there is anything brave about what this blogger did in writing his past down, even though I too found myself using the word “brave” in his comment section. In fact, I think writing this post was an inherently selfish act because the blogger is the perpetrator and not the victim. What is he really looking for? Absolution or traffic? The answer makes a difference to me. Even if it is absolution, it won’t be found so easily here.

I have learned that women do not always need to be so forgiving. I was at 12, and even at 19, forgiving others and hating myself when waking up bruised and missing my underwear. I will never again let my own silence make me that complicit.

*edited to add the link of the blogger. Go here to read his story. Although, since my post has come out, his initial post has changed. He has “toned” down his story. It was originally written about her not having a bra and him putting his hand between her thighs, not just resting on it. I wonder why a person would edit a post that they wrote because it was “true” then quietly change it when people took issue with it. Interesting.

*New Edit*

I asked Neil why he edited the story after the comments and my post came out. He wrote this, “I edited it because it was too intense and I wasn’t getting the reaction I wanted. I am not a journalist. I am a writer.”

*Final Edit*

Neil changed the original blog post back. He also shared this post. I think it is only fair of me to post it. I also hope we continue to have conversations as a community about all the issues that came about because of all these posts and tweets.

Thanks for reading and commenting.

New houses are seductive. A fresh coat of paint splashed on the walls, colonial crown molding. Every time I walk into a Home Depot, I am thrilled with the potential for re-invention. I have never owned a home before, was always at the whim of a stranger’s aesthetic. In past rentals, I covered old-fashioned wall paper and fake wood panels with Matisse museum knock-offs, old album covers, and Moroccan-styled tapestries. I marked each temporary territory as mine. I struggled to define each room’s identity.

In the first place I lived outside of a dorm room or my parents, I shared this fire-trap rental in a college town with my husband who was just my boyfriend at the time. We used milk crates as tables, and pushed together two twin beds we slept on horizontally. Our apartment was the second floor of a house that was otherwise abandoned. We had a big claw-foot tub but no shower, and two lizards we named Bonnie and Clyde. Having recently become vegetarians, we cooked rice and lentils and climbed out of the kitchen window each night to sit up on our rooftop drinking cheap wine straight from the bottle. Back then, we smoked under the stars. The lit tips of our cigarets punctuated our idealistic philosophy. Who we were going to be when we grew up did not matter. What mattered was that we could listen to bootleg Grateful Dead or Bob Dylan strumming acoustic. The possibilities were infinite.

Years later, we rented an apartment attached to the house of an angry landlord. My husband and I, newly married, would press our ears up to the shared wall that shook with his violence. We worried about his children. During the daylight hours when the wife left the house to collect the mail, she always wore dark sunglasses. In the sixth months we lived there, I never once had the chance to look her straight in the eyes. This is a regret I carry. That house accumulated sadness. My husband lost his job while we lived there, and I began to regret my own professional choices. Maybe, I’ll go back to school and get my MFA in creative writing. Dreaming is not the same thing as being brave. Like the inhabitants of that house, I cowered.

We lived in places that grew us like skin. The basement apartment we planned our wedding in, the two bedroom house we have lived in since five months before our daughter was born. I can trace the trajectory of my life, of all of my choices, by the shape of keys, the memory of their weight against my keychain.

There was a cottage the color of margarine that sat snug inside of woodland. From the computer desk tucked in the corner of the living room, I could look out at the bay when the trees were bare and beautiful. The air always smelled like salt from the ocean just a short ferry ride across to the barrier island. The hardwood floors were always gritty from the sand we tracked inside with our bare feet. David fed us all summer long from vegetables he grew in his garden. At night, we walked up to the movie theater in town. We watched old movies in black and white. We ate ice cream on the steps of historic buildings. We held hands. I lost three babies in the four years that we lived in that house. And yet, I still remember it as someplace that made me happy. Maybe it was because we adopted my son while we lived there. After he was born from another woman’s body, we brought him home to the screened in porch, to the pale green bassinet that we wedged next to our queen sized bed, the only furniture we could fit inside the tiny bedroom. It was in this house where my words came back to me. Some places grow themselves with only regrets, this was not one of them.

We are moving again. A home of our own is being created. There are rooms being painted like candlelight dinner, a bathroom the color of a Caribbean sea. I am hanging stars like Japanese lanterns on the bedroom ceiling for my children. I am still contemplating the perfect space to put my writing desk. I know that I will be a wife, a mother, and a writer inside this new place. I dream this is the house that I grow old in. But, as I contemplate the right type of art to hang in the living room, the perfect size area rug to cover the hardwood, I’m intrigued by the idea of identities and reinvention. I wonder just who I will become inside of these walls.

When I was 10, a neighbor knocked on our door. She sat in my mother’s kitchen all polyester grief. She told my mother about a broken down car that was at the shop. A broke down car is and is not a metaphor. She clearly wanted a ride to the market, but was afraid to ask. I watched the way she moved her mouth like a hint. It made me furious. Why didn’t she just come right out and tell my mother directly what she wanted? I left the room disgusted at how a person could be so weak. A half hour later, I smiled a greedy smile at the slope of my neighbor’s back as she walked down the street to her own home. I crept down the stairs and watched my mother quietly humming, washing out the dirty tea cups in the sink. I thought my mother the most beautiful thing.

My mother used to tell a story about my brother and I growing up at Christmas time. She liked to explain how my brother never asked for anything. Brian always believed in working hard for every thing he got. My mother would extol with obvious pride. I do not fault her in her storytelling. It is true. My brother is this very sort of amazing. Always has been. Enter the foil. Apparently, I was the opposite. I would sit with the Christmas catalogue and circle entire pages. I want this, and this, and this. The other children on the block called me Princess. When I hear my mother tell these stories, I marvel at how I could have been that little girl. Sometimes, I miss her.

All grown up, I once followed a homeless man down a street begging for him to get in my car so I could give him a thermos of hot tea and a blueberry muffin. The more he resisted, the more I was desperate to help him. There was something about his stubborn refusal that had me quite convinced that no one in the world could save him but me. Everyone needs. Some of us just need a lot more than others.

I am constantly trying to pin down my own definitions of self, but self is slippery. I grew up manipulated and angry. I grew up with the enormity of love. I spent my teenage years with an indefeasible loneliness and an inability to speak. I am constantly told that as an adult I talk too much. I am a woman surrounded by people. Sometimes all I do is ache to simply be left alone. All definitions are hazy.

Need is this strange thing, isn’t it? Look around and you see it, here, everywhere. Blogging only magnifies it. Sometimes I feel like we are this human circus. The fat lady charging a buck fifty to let the audience marvel in awe and revulsion at our skin. Some of us just smoke and mirrors, bravery like the man who stares down the open mouth of a lion and dares the crush of teeth on the vulnerability of his own head. Only most times the audience is unaware that the ferocious beast has been drugged into submission. Needs get tamed.

I do not know what I need or if I actually need anything at all. I am no longer the little girl who can turn the slick page of a Sears catalogue and have happiness materialize. I’m not a sullen teenager, either. I’ve been thinking a lot about that long ago neighbor. Why was I so angry with her? I think the answer to what I am asking might be found in the washing of dirty dishes and the broken down car that is and is not a metaphor.

I can not breathe. I dream the weight of stones pressing heavy on the back of my throat. I am like the last lines of a Beckett play, Let’s go. Yes. Let’s go, only to be bound by stage directions. It is not suppose to be this hard. I am not suppose to be feel this trapped. But, I do.

My three-year old is screaming upstairs as I type this. I put him to bed three hours ago, exhausted by his fits, doors slammed, toys thrown, anger and constant unmet expectation. I kiss him soft as sparrow’s wings and stay by his bedside until he drifts to sleep. I try and tip-toe down the stairs, but he wakes up, and wakes up, and keeps waking expectant and needy every half hour. I feel like I’m drowning in his greed to touch my hair and smell my skin. I lose my patience and finally yell at my husband, who has long gone to sleep. I demand that David wake up and be a father. He looks at me with sleep and bitter. It reminds me of all the ways that I am failing.

We use to be young. We used to try and pants each other in the kitchen. Do you remember the smell of snowflakes falling on a Buffalo winter?

Figure it out, Kelly. You need to figure this out. I wonder when he expects that this will happen between the full-time job at work and the full-time job at home being a mother, in between the navigating phone calls to doctors to set up the battery of tests that are suppose to give us answers. Answers that only serve to scare us both into protracted silence like a thick rope that strangles. Bet we never imagined it was going to be quite this hard. Marriage should not be like a luke-warm bottle of beer full of yeasty sadness. Mothering is not suppose to feel this lonely.

When my son was small enough to cradle in my hands, I used to sing him Joni Mitchell songs at midnight. I use to rock him on my shoulder pressed against his tiny belly, one hand upon the round of his back. Bleary-eyed, sleepless, on instinct. I knew exactly what my infant son needed. I try and sing those same songs as lullaby to my son, now. He puts the small spread of his hands over my mouth. He reminds me that he is no longer my baby. Oh, but you are, my darling boy. You are. Even if I am bereft.

And, we are, my darling man. We are. Even in these days we live as disappointment.

My daughter is bruised by the moon.

My hands are loaded with grocery bags. I’m trying not to pull my daughter across the parking lot. I want to have patience, but I don’t. I’m thinking about the dinner that still needs to be made, and the clean laundry stacked in indignation on my bed just waiting to be put away. My daughter is digging her heels into the pavement. Her eyes are fastened to the moon.

I want you to follow me home! My daughter points her tiny finger at the sky and makes celestial demands.

I’m taking deep breaths as I cajole her into her car seat. She pounds her feet against the back of the driver’s seat to emphasis her desire. I turn the key in the ignition and then we go. As we pull out onto the highway, the sky goes dark. The moon is directly over the head of our car. My daughter can no longer see it.

Where my moon go, Momma? Why it not following me? My daughter is quick to cry, even as I try to explain that the moon is directly above us. It exists like a certain type of faith, not visible to our eyes. My daughter will not be pacified. Longing has made her blind and furious.

***
When I was five, my father took me into the city. I stood with my small body pressed up against the enormity of a skyscraper. The city pulsed against my fingertips.

Daddy, I can feel the city breathing.

I was all elbows and exclamation. My father, a man who carries science in his pants pocket the way some men carry cigars and loose change, fought the impulse to harness the moment with talk of the accumulated mass of wind speed. Instead, he placed his forehead against the glass window pane. One hundred and two stories high, he stopped what he was thinking just to dream with me.

Later on, my father waited patient as a Sunday nun on a dirty street corner as I gypsy danced to the sounds produced by an old bum. This bum had whiskey breath and rotting teeth, and he played Sympathy For the Devil on an overturned plastic bucket with two chipped wooden spoons.

My father had to hold me tight against his chest as I cried the entire train ride home. So easily overwhelmed with the humanity of things, I simply spilled myself over. It is because my father loved me like a heartbreak that I write to shatter my own bones. It is because of my father that I am drawn to all these wild things.

My own daughter is young. She is malleable and soft. She cries nakedly in her car seat, feeling betrayed by her own vision of the night sky. My mind, caught up with thoughts of bath time and the cable bill, the cat who may or may not have been fed that day, begins to unravel. I need to rock my daughter like a railway car.

The straight drive of the highway would mean we’d make it home 20 minutes earlier than the curve and loop of the suburban sprawl that are the back roads leading to our neighborhood. My hands make their own decision against the wheel. When our car turns right off the highway exit ramp, the moon is like a magic trick. It appears full in my daughter’s window like a dirty handkerchief suddenly transformed into dove.

Momma, my moon! My daughter is all her own elbows and exclamations. Where you been, my friend? I been so long looking for you? My daughter giggles against the night time, and my own heart swells to explode. I think about my father as we take the long slow drive home.

It comes to me while shampooing my daughter’s hair, the intimacy of the moment. The air in the bath is laden with steam. My daughter’s body is clothed in only bubbles. She giggles innocently as I rinse her head with clean water from the tap. I am simply wrecked by how beautiful a body can be, as I watch her mock dive under imaginary waves with the sweet of her cheeks as dolphin fin. There is no shame in this moment. There is no shame as my daughter shakes the bathwater from her skin and crawls into my toweled arms. I am her refuge from the cold. She molds herself against my hip. I am overcome with something akin to religion. My body belongs to her. She is of my body.

Later on, she struggles to put on her pants. Don’t help me, Momma! I do it myself. Her fingers pull frantic at the cloth. She kicks her tiny legs in frustration. I want to reach out with my experience and my expertise to slide up the soft cotton of her waistband. She will not let me. She is certain and stubborn that she can bend her body to match her will. For this, I am so grateful. And yet, I mourn the prelude this moment is, my daughter’s body growing up and away from my own.

Right now, I can draw the lines of my daughter’s skin and bones from the most recent of memory. There are no secrets between our bodies. My lap is the place that she burrows. My neck the simple statement that childhood love can make when clasped in lazy circles with her tiny hands. There does not exist between us the boundaries that age will bring. I wonder how long our intimacy will last?

Someday we will retreat behind closed and private doors to change our clothes. Hairs will sprout against the Irish creme of her legs, and her naked budding breasts will be foreign to me. Who will be her recognition, then, if it is not me? Then there will be mirrors, and the eyes of hopeful lovers who I pray will be forever grateful for the abundance of her body and her gifts. I ache against the thought that is that day, even as I know that I will celebrate it when it is finally here. 

Now, my daughter and I lay side by side in comfort and familiarity. She curls her body against me, a perfect fit from hip to chin. We listen to the rain fall. We watch birds seek shelter outside the window above. Our breaths are slow and gentle, our hearts beat a song of syncopation. My body belongs to her. She is of my body.

Someday my daughter will grow up. Someday she will grow away from me. Today is not that day.