She wanted all the things I did: comfort, security, affection. In the safety of the spirit world, I’d imagined sleeping in a labored-over, palely colorful, fresh nursery, ripe with the smell of a crib’s dark finished wood, decorated with a fairy-tale motif. In a diagonal corner of a high ceiling, someone has affixed a net to hold up soft playthings, silent decoration to everyone else but joyously alive friends to me—the stuffed bears, rabbits, lions, monsters, and baby dolls that I will talk to with eyes wide open while everyone else sleeps. My brand-new eyes, eager to look even if it is at nothing, could stare into the endlessness of carefully painted, smooth white or cream walls, their infinity broken only by the right straight grandeur of a bookshelf filled with the bright, parallel, slim spines of my bedtime stories. The many gifts for my coming—some practical but most just frivolous—have been neatly put away in a closet with golden knobs. My young ears, with clarity sharp as a cub’s, will find the jumbled, sappy songs of nursery rhyme albums annoying and dull. With the skill of a jungle cat waiting for sounds of the slightest disturbance—parted leaves or a blade of glass quietly wounded by the prey’s paw steps—I will instead strain for the dawn and night sounds chambered in tricky silence: dew landing, crows calling, train tracks rumbling, insects mating, exhausted night wind practicing for the next busy day. A rocking chair will rest near my bed for my mother and our visitors, and in that chair is where I will get to play the new role best: whining, crying, nursing, cooing, twisting for attention, and smiling in my sleep. New life never rests easy; only recently mortal, we remain cynosures of a jealous spirit world eager to steal us back. So we sleep in short stints and wake often to keep the searching spirits at bay, at least until we make up our minds about the new world and decide if we want to stay. In the middle of the night, I’ll wait for the friends I had on the other side to appear, or not—though I’ll know they’re there when the rocking chair tips and sways to music in my head, remembered from a past begun many moons before birth.