I did not bear you to be my undoing (against all my grandmother's wishes). You are here now. But one day you will go. You will know your own joys, your own sorrows. You will not walk my autumn, and my summer will not call to you. (To think you might sing someone else's song— such hopes are delusions, mere wind.) I cannot keep you folded in my palm— that small, safe place where I am always at rest. So you will squander your youth, and I will despise myself forever after. You are a bird! How can I hold you?! I can only offer you wings. Sometimes you return to me with them folded, so that I might draw the blade from your back...
# To A Fetus You are not yet a person, they say, just a cluster of cells, a becoming, a question mark folded in flesh. But I have felt you move like a fish darting through dark water, like a thought trying to find its voice. You are smaller than a grape, smaller than the space between one heartbeat and the next, yet you carry the weight of worlds— mine, and the ones I imagine for you. They debate your status in committees, in courtrooms lit by fluorescent certainty, while you simply grow, indifferent to their logic, following an older mathematics, the geometry of becoming. I wonder what dreams you have in that small ocean, what languages your cells speak that we have forgotten. You are not yet a person, but you are already a responsibility, a prayer, a choice that chooses itself. You are the future asking to be born, and I— I am the threshold you must cross.
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