Baby

Tiny hands, there is so much I want to tell you. When you cry, I see mascara stains at your cheeks, for a second I see the future. And your laughter billows up in earthen smoke, so I shake myself, and I remember your tiny hands. I think of your mother, I think of when we were young and her dark hair fell in a perfect sheath across her face. She was something of a mystery, in her bedroom of a thousand dried roses, and bottles of perfume. Gifts of guilty lovers. Her life was kept hidden from me, and the nights which grew too long under the shadow of an unforgiving city, these were relayed through our mother's discretion, detailed enough to turn cruelty to intrigue, paint violence as adventure through my eyes of naivety and boredom. And perhaps this is why I idolized those years as something woven with beautiful tragedy, with gemstone apologies and an ever-present flurry of cinematic romance.

I think of your father, who knows the whole world, whose stories fill the space of marshland cabins on family vacations, whose life has been a storm of creation and destruction, of art, of risks taken. Now his voice encapsulates these dreams, his voice so filled with life as he whispers your name.

In the end, maybe these stories aren't so different. Maybe all along they've been the same story, confused and winding but ever-synged by the same flame of lessons learned, the same hope that the worst days will be forgotten. Maybe you are these stories, and your big blue eyes remember everything.

There is so much I want to tell you, yet in a way, I'm starting to believe you already know.