Nouns and Now.

We can never know what the future holds. For her, or for anyone. She is this thing, bright and new that I can’t quite see the end of. I want to know what she will be at 13, but I never want to stop seeing her at 0.

There is nothing abstract about her. She is real, here, now. I can speak about love, but there is no such thing as this kind of love. It doesn’t really exist. It is not something that you or anyone else can experience. It is mine. My wife may understand, other fathers and mothers may understand, but they do not feel this. I look at her and she is miraculous. I look at her and I am dumbfounded. I look at her and I find so many other inadequate adjectives. The best I can do is to only use nouns.

• Button (the kind that makes two very separate things close together)
• Eyes (the kind that are do dark and so knowing that you can’t look away when they are open)
• Nose (the kind that is trying to be every kind of hope imaginable)
• Smile (the one and only that I want to see)

I wasn’t in labor, and I didn’t have to push. I didn’t carry her for 10 months, and I didn’t wake up every day feeling sick. I can never be her mother, but I’m glad that someone can. You see, I owe her the whole of my belief that souls grip one another over a precipice, tight enough to either gain solid footing or be broken completely apart.

Soon she will stand on her own two feet. Soon she will think, and laugh, and be broken hearted. Soon, but not now.

For now she is bundled up tight. For now she is dependent. For now she is the best thing that I have ever known, not because of what she can become, her potential for greatness, but because of what she is already: my daughter.