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Her hand is prawn-curved around my finger and it feels red warm where her skin fences mine. I focus on it a little too long. It hurts to see the vulnerability of those soft-shell nails, the milk-puffed innocence of her plump fingers.
When I feel too much emotion, a fanfare of yellow lightning strikes loud beneath my eyelids and my body heeds the warning, my already dampened breaths squeeze to barely undulating mist, mere soft spray from a long-cemented diaphragm.
I should be sleeping now, in this coal black of mid-night, but the heaviness of my muscles, the bladed weight of my skin and bones has smothered the notion of rest.
She is a blessing and I should be grateful, she is the answered prayer from a cavern of loneliness, the fervent wish from my need to please, but a voice within my gut screams that I'm not grateful.
Away from my bed I force a tight line of thanks onto my lips in the barrage of congratulations, the garbled coos in a pitch fake as plastic. I retreat from eyes filled with the wetness of remembering, shoo my discomfort away with the rearrangement of a knitted blanket and harried claims of a diaper to change.
I hold her and feed her and change her. I bathe her in strawberry bubbles and hum into her soft-curled ear but I’ll never be enough. I’ve never been enough. I'm ill-attuned to the wants of others, and could never provide what was required to ease suffering. I've said the wrong thing so many times I stopped speaking, and muted, backed myself into a corner of feigned disinterest until I became invisible.
But she sees me now and that is my shame, she looks deep into my darkness with those rain-slate eyes until the tug of guilt pulls up from my toe bones.
I tell her I'm sorry that she has me as her mother and resolve to try and be enough for her, for today at least, however long this day may be.
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