The Second

I was just a few weeks pregnant in this picture with my second son and I felt boundless, eternal, as if being pulled by my own private star. I kissed my toddler good night and held him, we held him — his inevitable sibling and me. I put on a latex bodysuit and all of my necklaces and my tallest boots and walked the streets of my city. Everyone was out, all those other inevitable people. We were all so real and alive.We had all been born already. I held my real and alive husband’s hand and laughed with my real and alive friends. I told them I was pregnant (how far along?) and they smiled hesitantly (ooh so early), but I could already feel the weight of next year’s baby on my chest. I knew the other feeling — the plus sign on the stick that belied the emptiness inside, the bleeding, the not bothering to call the doctor to confirm what my body had already told me so bluntly. But this time I could practically smell the pop of green emerging from the soil, feel how nothing could pull out roots planted so deeply in this world. And even when I saw the blood a few days later, and my heart began to rise in my chest like a paper lantern propelled by the fire of my fear, the inevitable child blew it out like so many birthday candles. We’re here. We’re together. And when I walked to the doctor’s office the next day, the inevitable child sent me a sign. A scoop of pelicans, my favorite birds, flew right over my head and past the medical building. They made an arrow of themselves and their union. They kept soaring ahead, sailing, barely moving — resting, mid-air, in the current of their togetherness. We can rest like that, the inevitable child told me. We did. We do. And on the day he was born, he curled back into himself in the new womb of my chest, and I used my voice to begin to teach him the words that he taught me. “We’re here. We’re together.” Our motto, our praise song, our gift. And we rested in the current our togetherness made, the cells still replicating and falling away, the thousand ways we would learn to utter that phrase to one another and the world already blooming into a thousand ceaseless springs.