Two is the number of the day, and I feel like the Count on Sesame Street. Can you tell I spend all my time with toddlers now? And the children, wobbling on unsteady feet, new language unfurling inside them like tree roots, they warm my heart. My new little boy waved to me the other day, said, "Buh-buh," blew me kisses. It's all I thought about while walking under waterfalls and past infrastructural cracks.
My babies are stretching their arms, their legs, their voices, and I am, too.
I've been thinking about death again. The permanence, the darkness, forever ever. I thought I would find some solace from it in love, in my juvenile fantasy that maybe love could last forever and a piece of me could last with it, but things are transient and meaningless. I will have to find my solace in the joy I experience and the joy I give, instead. In some ways it is unsatisfying, and in other ways, the most satisfying thing I could hope for. I tell baby boy that I live on through the work I do, like the chaos theory postulates. A butterfly flaps its wings and causes a tsunami in China. The tiny positive changes I make in my childrens' lives ripple outward through the generations, and even though I won't be physically present, things will be different because I existed.
That will have to be enough.