Yesterday my baby smiled at me for the first time, and my heart was filled with joy. Today 20 kindergarteners were murdered in their school. I cried on my nursing baby while I read the news. I read the news all day long.

A couple weeks ago, after telling her the story of my daughter’s birth, I admitted to my mother than I had never before truly understood why people were somehow more horrified by the deaths of babies and young children than of teenagers and adults. Losing anyone is horribly painful, and one’s own child worst of all, but it had seemed to me, before, that if one were forced to choose, it would be preferable to lose a young baby over an elementary school student, a little kid over a teenager. This idea was based on the logic that it is more devastating to lose a life-long friend, after building up decades of memories and shared experience, than to lose someone one has only just recently met, no matter how intense the initial connection might be. The only argument I could think of for why the death of a younger person might be somehow “worse” revolved around a notion of opportunity being prematurely cut short, and I didn’t think that factor could “outweigh” the impact of losing a loved one after that love that had ripened and strengthened and evolved over time. Wasn’t there, in the latter case, more to lose? Thus, the longer you knew the deceased, it seemed, the worse the loss would be.

The above is a very naive conception of love, in general, but its wrongness became much more glaringly obvious to me when I first became able to try to apply it to parental love. My love for my daughter, who is still a tiny baby with whom I only have 5 weeks of shared experience (plus the nine months she resided in my body), is already utterly complete. Yes, I will come to know her more fully over hopefully many, many years, and my appreciation of her will in some ways deepen and ripen and change, but my love for her is not going to somehow increase incrementally as a function of her age. The very idea is ridiculous. It presumes there is some limit on my ability to love her currently. It presumes that my love for her is somehow determined by an accumulation of events occurring over time, by actions on her part or on mine, by any number of mundane factors which are, in reality, rendered so microscopic by the enormity of my love for her, the vastness of the connection we have shared always, from *before* that moment when I first laid eyes on her, that they are truly irrelevant.

This must be why it is so often said that parenthood teaches us what unconditional love is. There is nothing she can do to increase or decrease my love for her. If love were something that could be possessed, she would already have it all, everything I can offer her. She does not need to live even another day to “earn” it. It is contingent upon nothing, certainly not the length of her life. As my mother put it, having a child makes you realize that it takes all of 5 seconds to completely devote your entire life to another person. Actually, I think, it does not even take 5 seconds. It takes no time at all.

My life is utterly intermingled with hers. This took no time after her birth to accomplish. It is simply a fact. I heard recently about some new studies which apparently show that mothers carry cells from their children embedded in their bloodstreams and even their brains, potentially for the rest of their lives. I’m not sure how well-established the science behind this is, but if it is true, it is consistent with my feeling. Even though her body appears to be spatially separate from my own now that she is born, I still have a very palpable sense that there are parts of me that live in her, parts of her that live in me.

The idea that she could die and yet I would remain living is just unthinkable. It is unthinkable. How could my heart ever beat again without her heart beating somewhere in reply, like a call and response chant? My very breath feels contingent on hers. How can I exhale without seeing her inhale?

The first time I left the house without her, the first time I was ever away from her at all, she was a little over a week old. For this first outing, I went shopping at Whole Foods. In the car on the way there, I felt like I was seeing the city I’ve lived in for over a year for the first time. Surrounded by shoppers in the grocery store, I felt like an alien from another planet. I couldn’t remember where anything was in the store, though I had shopped there many times before the baby was born. It was literally as if the person who had gone on all those previous shopping trips, that woman who was not yet a mother, had been someone else entirely. All I did was leave her immediate presence for a little over an hour. I felt dizzy and disoriented and not entirely there. I got back to her as soon as I could.

I am slowly learning how to leave the house and trust that she will be there when I return. Someday I will have to learn how to let her go off to school for hours at a time (someday, God help me, off to college). Today that prospect seems even scarier than it did yesterday. I can’t help but think, if my baby died, I might, somehow, with an enormous amount of help, muster the courage to continue living, but I would not be the same person anymore. I have been a mother for so short a time, and yet it is so clear to me that there is simply no other pain that could rival the pain of losing a child. Before I was a parent, I simply had no idea the scope of the love I would feel for my daughter, nor the scope of the suffering I would become vulnerable to by becoming her mother. My whole heart aches for those suffering parents in Connecticut tonight, whose healing will require nothing short of grace. May those mothers be comforted by the awareness that their babies are still with them, always, that they carry tiny pieces of their children embedded in their flesh and their hearts and their minds.

There is a Zen story my friend Mitsu told me a few years ago, after another friend of ours sadly lost his adult son. In the story, a man goes to see a sage and asks the sage to compose a special prayer he can say for the prosperity of his family. After careful consideration the sage comes up with this prayer: “Grandfather die. Father die. Son die.” The man is at first horrified by what seems like a very morbid prayer, but in the end the sage explains to him that having his family members die in that order is the greatest blessing he could ask for. Or something like that. I don’t remember exactly how the story went, but that prayer hasn’t left my mind since the news of the Newtown shooting broke.

Sitting naked on a pillow next to the space heater wondering if I have committed murder, and can it even be murder if you don’t know for sure if you’ve done it? Forgive them Father for they do not know what they do. That love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it. The mothers and the daughters and the dying, when we think of the future what we are thinking of is our children. It did not occur to me until recently that, if the choice is between killing you and killing my own babies (and that is, in fact, the choice), my greater responsibility is already to them.

I asked the daughter if she wanted to read the story or just look at the pictures, and she said, look at pictures, so we looked at them and said what they were, all the animals and the pink trees and purple trees and ladders and words, and she gives her love so freely, her mother says, but not to everyone. I went looking for Antarctica and found the beginning of time, the beginning of the new notime time, and somehow every movie I see and every concert I hear has a man dressed up in a tiger suit in it. I want that rapper’s tiger coat, I said, and my friend said he would back me up on that one. My fortune says I should reevaluate my plans for the future. My best friend says he cannot breathe. I buy plane tickets for an exorbitant price, I realize I cannot possibly use them, I don’t talk, I can’t say. I would kill you with my bare hands, I text, while sitting in a dining hall crying my eyes out and not eating the food I have gathered in a daze.

Time is the most precious thing you can have, her grandfather says. The rain. The new corset. In Quebec, tabernacle and chalice are swear words. The coincidences. The one I love so much I cannot speak to him anymore. And yet I brag about him, he made that, he did that, my best friend! I have already cried in front of so many people who don’t know me yet. There is a way in which imagining a certain future seems to prevent it from happening. There is a way in which imagining a certain future is the happening of it. To the one I may be beginning to love, I cannot shut up. You already killed me. I feel like my breath is gone I can’t breathe. I can’t believe.

The father has nightmares that someone is taking his daughter away, all night, every night. My cunt, there is no other word, is burning. But Antarctica. But the children. We are twirling around in circles with our scarves and our dresses fanning out. Ever since she was born I have never not been afraid. What is the point of doing it if you’re just going to half-ass it? This is it. This is your life. Next to having a baby, nothing matters. Why don’t we talk about the things that really matter? Death and love and intimate family relationships. Why am I so afraid that my emotion will cause you to have an emotion, that I will get inside, that I will impose?

Where did you go? Why aren’t you here? Why did you leave me? But I told you, I told you, this really wasn’t going to be okay. But I have to get more data, I have to write it up, I have to tell the story. I told only one friend about the time we both came just by holding hands. She said, that belongs in a book. Here it is. This is it. No more waiting until you can do it justice. You can’t, ever. This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, that Eliot poem has been echoing in my head for weeks. How did you fail to notice that the world already ended? After the end of the world, there is another world.

The worst outcome is, you kill your opponent, better is he kills you, then, you kill each other, and best is everyone lives. But, then, I always preferred tragedy to comedy. In a tragedy, you kill each other. There is a way in which imagining a certain future causes it to happen.

Expectation. Forgive me.

I miss you when you are gone, and when you are near I miss you in anticipation of your next departure. There is no such thing as closeness. Objects can be no closer than they are, co-arisen and inseparable. Everything interpenetrates and yet I long to be penetrated, as if something is missing, as if something is lost. Who am I, if you do not know me? You ask me to write the answer on your face, yet you insist that it must be spoken, it must be in words. For a moment, before you explained your request, I thought you had understood. You said, with your air, or, with your breath, but all you meant was talking. You just wanted me to talk, as if that might bridge the gap. Oh, you do not know me, and I cannot tell you, it would only prove me right. What do you know without words? I am touching you and you are writing words on a screen. You are transmitting thoughts to someone else and you are not totally here. I leave and wonder when you will notice my absence. This is the only reason I leave you, so that maybe you will experience the lack of me, as I experience the lack of you. No matter how close I pull you, even into my very body, I lack you.

We stood on a cliff looking out over the edge of the world. It is so big, I say. It is so still, you say. Back in the town we had touched the leather horse things, and you said, they are made for something so much more powerful than we are, and you said, they are made so well, better than anything for people. And I touched them all with my hands, bridles and halters and bits and saddles. Oh September. The saddles the blankets the crops. Neither of us has ridden a horse. We will talk of the trips we have taken. I will tell you to buy a certain toy for a child I do not know. I hope that child is me. Once, you bought black shoes with white lightening bolts on them. I do not care for shoes because my feet are so big. You put metal to glass with duct tape. You remind me of my father.

My father called me, thinking I was thousands of miles from where I am. I have not returned the call. They say that fathers who have been absent ought to write to their daughters and apologize, even if it is the only thing they can do, even if their daughters will never forgive them or even acknowledge them. This, God bless him, my father has always done.

I want a long dress; I want a knife; I want a baby. We talk of Henry Miller, of his honesty, and the air is so light at the edge of the world, and so many of the trails are unauthorized. Why don’t we worship our ancestors here, you ask. In my family, we do, I say. And in another world I am writing to a stranger about how Georgia is like Russia and already I have nostalgia for the future I might share with the person I would tell this to, the person who might understand. You shove your arms in a heap of manure to see how warm it is on the inside — the people give you a look.

I can feel it all through me, the future we will not act out, the future we have already had, the future we have shared from the beginning. There was never a beginning, there was never. There was the edge of the world. It was so large. It was so still. And the birds on the rocks were sensitive, and the waves were sensitive, and the eyes that saw it all were sensitive.

It was simple: I loved someone and I wanted them to know it.

I would take you with me. I would take you into the hole in the center of my chest where I do not exist, have never existed, the laughter of permeability, the air. I would take you where I cannot go myself. God, this pain is exquisite, and your face, I write on your face, I take you on my life boat, I die in your arms as you change from a boy to an old man and back again, over and over. You are a completely different person. You are a mirror. I want to walk to the edge of the world with your DNA in my body.