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.

I experience long periods of absence from record-keeping due to actual fear of giving permanence to certain feelings, emotions, mental states, experiences; fear of injecting certain thoughts into others’ minds by giving voice to them. (How does this relate to parenthood and the desire to control our children’s perceptions of us before they are even born?)

Changing archives: the strong urge to purge journals of past entries that don’t fit with current ideas/ideals of self, only to discover later that the criteria upon which I was sorting no longer seem to apply — particularly judgments on spiritual vs secular, intellectual vs mundane, art vs artifice.

What qualifies as authentic? What qualifies as well-designed?

. . .

I don’t want to read a novel, or even a published diary (originally written on paper), or correspondence, or philosophical texts — I have a very specific desire to read a particular kind of early-90′s era online journal that very few people are making anymore. I still crave that particular form.

. . .

My belly is so taut (taught). It’s hard to stand from sitting. My back aches. I have been straining so hard to fit my life into some sort of framework in anticipation of this baby, there is no room for anything else. In my mental life, I feel constricted, I want to open out. I want to stick certain pockets of the past back onto me and expand out through them, but I also realize this is incorrect. I shouldn’t be attempting to fit back into old clothing I’ve outgrown, in hopes that wearing it will make me look nice enough to work up the courage necessary to enter the new clothing store. There is no need to reclaim my lost selves. I have not lost them. There is no losing anything that is actually real. The past is not a place to look for myself. The past is not a place at all.

Where has my mind been all this time? The same place, all along. Radical inclusion is radical exclusion. Reject all possible personas — embrace their intersection.

. . .

Persistent problems with the idea of work, why my “work” never seems to be the thing I’m interested in. Some sort of box I create around it, so it becomes insulated from other aspects of my intellectual/perceptual life, when, in order to flourish, it should be constantly infused by them, part of a hydraulic, pulsing, live system.

“Work” is bland immediately — a task to be completed. It is shocking to me when I find myself talking about my “work” at social gatherings and other people have the impression it is exciting, that I find it interesting and alive.

Where *is* the aliveness in my life? The baby is unmistakably living — moving, kicking, growing, changing. Is this also true of me? I must be moving and changing too, even if I can’t always feel it.

. . .

It takes a very concerted effort to live this close to the beach without experiencing the ocean every single day, without really even noticing it for weeks at a time. Stop doing all that work to avoid seeing something so beautiful. Identify the effort you’re making and STOP.

Yet, the fairly common experience of falling in love shares all the hallmarks of an enlightenment. It is an overwhelming, radical shift in perspective, which seems to come from the outside — unprovoked, undeserved, a grace, a gift. It happens rapidly, changing everything in its wake, challenging one’s deepest assumptions about the world and one’s place in it, most particularly the assumption that one is essentially alone, disconnected from others in a fundamental way, separated from God.

Every aspect of living is touched by it. The lover’s mental and physical processes are changed, and the shift is quite visible to everyone who interacts with the affected person.

When asked to describe what has happened — how, overnight, the lover seems to have departed her usual, mundane existence for one in which laughter and coincidences rain down upon her with such force that it is hard to see anything at all that does not appear to be drenched in beauty, and yet, at the same time, she has not truly left her old world at all, but is actually more fully immersed in it — all but the most sensitive among us are left at a loss, clinging at lyrics from love songs and sappy poetry and cliched adages that can only capture some tiny fraction of the sensation.

Just like the mystic, the lover will be asked such questions as: How did you know it was really God/love? How did you know this was the Real Thing, and not just a delusion? What makes this experience different from all the other, looney, short-lived obsessions you’ve had? Can you please tell me how you provoked this, what caused this thing to happen to you? What can I do to make it happen to me? How can I be happy? How will I spot it when it comes, will I hear it, the small voice whispering to me in the night, saying I’m the one you’ve been looking for?

And oh, oh, how the lover would like to say — is dying to say.

But she finds that she cannot.

This wisdom is not to be known intellectually. It is beyond rationality, beyond logic, beyond proof. It is to be seen, felt, experienced. It cannot be owned. It cannot be attained by grasping. It cannot be found by looking.

You do not need to worry, says the grandmother deep inside your chest: when it happens to you, and it will happen to you, you will know. You cannot fail to notice.

You will find yourself, my child, someday, looking into the eyes of someone who had only weeks ago, days ago, seconds ago, been a stranger, and seeing in those eyes your own future, as clear and recognizable as your reflection in a mirror.

You will ask this person, do you remember what it was like, weeks ago, days ago, seconds ago, before we had ever met? And this person, this other person, will reply, No, I don’t.

You will not remember either.

* * *

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you, reader, without whom I could not exist. My life depends critically on yours, and so I offer you this advice:

The next time you find yourself standing at the edge of an abyss — unable to see the bottom and yet sure you will lose everything you hold dearest in the fall, certain that you ought to be terrified and yet still, somehow, inexplicably, drawn forward — do not hesitate. Jump.

Affliction can be a blessing. The older I get, the more I see that, more often than not, it is.

* * *

I dreamt my teacher and I were out of the beach, running around in the sand, trying to collect data about the waves. The waves always receded before we got all the information we needed. The task was clearly impossible. We could never fully understand the ocean this way. There was so much time pressure, on every cycle of flow and ebb, and yet we weren’t panicked. What mattered was not that we solve the problem. What mattered was that we were out there, looking, making the necessary observations, together. And it made me so happy to know, that of all the people in the universe, we were the ones out there. I was shocked by this, actually, that we were out there alone, and amazed that he was willing to take on the whole ocean with only me.

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.

“… it began to dawn on me that not only was I now old enough to have a baby, I was almost too old to have a baby… So all my time was spent measuring time. While I listened to strangers and tried to patiently have faith in the unknown, I was also wondering how long it would take, and if any of it really mattered compared to having a baby. Word on the street was that it did not. Nothing mattered compared to having a baby.”

“As if I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside of the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension… It’s not that my life before the internet was so wildly diverse — but there was only one world and it really did have everything in it. Domingo’s blog was one of the best I had ever read, but I had to drive to him to get it, and he had to tell it to me with his whole self, and there was no easy way to search for him. He could be found only accidentally.”

“I suppose this was one of the reasons people got married, to make a fiction that was tellable. It wasn’t just movies that couldn’t contain the full cast of characters — it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end. I knew I would forget this within the hour, and then remember, and then forget, and remember. Each time I remembered it would would be a tiny miracle, and forgetting was just as important — I had to believe in my own story.”

– Miranda July, It Chooses You

I just sat on my little futon in my little apartment and read this entire book, cover-to-cover. I can’t even remember the last time I did that. That last bit — and forgetting was just as important — made me cry.

I never thought something like this would happen to us, he said, his hand resting in her heartbeat.

She rolled toward him. The atoms in his skin spread out, making room for her breath to seep through.

I knew, she said.

How did you know?

The first time we ever met, standing on that path, you were already so familiar to me, like we had known one another forever.

But we had never met before.

That’s how I knew something like this would have to happen to us.

So we would know each other forever?

Before you were born, I knew you.

I see you, he said. / I see you.