Genesis
Caitlin Fitzgerald
I will have red hair. I will be named Samantha and the freckles on my jaw will look like the Big Dipper. I will cry when I see an old man eating alone at a diner. I will balance on the outer edges of my feet when I stand in one spot for a long time. I will live to be old.And look at her, now, so unaware of me, giggling with her hand on her bare, flat stomach. I already know her better than anyone. Right now she is thinking how her skin has never felt so soft under her fingertips, how her body has never felt so alive, so rich with blood. It is the first time she has not wondered what he is thinking, there are no did I do the right things twirling through her head. When she touches his fleshy hip she thinks she might seep into the sheets; this much happiness can’t stay solid. He tickles the back of her knees and she shrieks with delight. I will be ticklish there too.
She thinks she is the happiest she will ever be right now, tangled in the sweet, drying sheets, and that’s fine with her, but she is wrong. She will love me with a fierceness she didn’t know she could possess. It will be animalistic and consuming, and it will never fade no matter what I do or where I go. And it will frighten him.
He with his black curls and little-boy smile, of course, will love me too. But he will always be a little scared of me, how small I am, how I make his world so breakable. Watch him, he’ll pull the sheet up to his chest now, suddenly aware of himself, as he always does. Things come to him at a constant delay; he is laughing before he gets the joke, kissing before he feels her lips on his own, still singing after the song has ended. I will be at least a year old before the concept of fatherhood slaps him in the face. The night it does he will weep in his bed, he is so overcome with joy.
I know all this now, but it will leave me as soon as light reaches me. The Mozart they’ll stream to me won’t stay in my head; I will be born knowing nothing except the way to breathe and her smell. They will be forever interlocked for me, the intake of air and her scent, sugary and yellow. I will say I wish my name were Daffodil and she will laugh. I will live to make her laugh.
She does not know any of this, now curled up against his side like a child. And she is a child, not even twenty-five, still unsure of herself, as I surely will be at her age. See the way she chews on the ends of her hair. She will stop that habit when she finds she has not bled in too long; the ends of her hair will be razor-straight. It makes me sad to know I’ll never see her chew her hair or bite her pinky nail. It is odd to make a person grow up.
Volume CXX, No.1