Only those with a physical experience of creating a person understand.

Shoot—of carrying the first traces of one, if only for a time.

Dads go Here, here’s your name, here are your papers confirming this.

OK. There. You’re this now.

Make me proud.

Mothers, on the other hand.

You were a thing in my tummy. A part of me. A collection of my cells.

I fkng made you, bro.

PHYSICALLY.

You were me, and now you’re you.

Calling your own shots making your own calls like the fuck?

I don’t even have the mental recourse to fix you in my name, to assume your okayness bc you have my name, when the strangeness of this rears its head.

Bc you didn’t even get my name.

Shit, I didn’t even keep my name.

How baffling, living through this disconnect. Continually.

I can’t even.

Childbirth, its termination, are the WWIs every mom and almost-mom exist with.

A chasm of incommunicable privacy.

The site of fertility…of damp caves and rich soil, of the womb…where life begins.

The creation of a person-thing with your body/cells that society calls a fixed thing but you know is, physically feel to be, just a cell-thing capable of growing but equally at risk of dying, at any moment.

The epitome of that about which one must remain silent—

You decide on a spot far out but not all the way out. Decide this without speaking, but instinctively. Reading each other’s bodies for where is right. Out of earshot of the pier ruckus, beyond the spotlight illuminating the pier’s side stairs—illuminating an exit, a way down, so folks won’t trip. But shy of the water. Well shy. To right where evidence of higher tides has padded the sand solid. Smoothened it smooth. To where, you can see, the highest tide reached, before calling it and heading back. Before going: That’s far enough; time to retreat. Abort. Lil mini ridge there, where. Elevated, just past the dividing lip, by comfy, squishy sand, since no water, no salt, has hit it. Outta the salt, the water’s range. Not going anywhere. Good where it is. Fkn chillin. The sea, the waves, the wind like a cave. A sonic whorl. You are the eye of the whorl. You zip up the lightweight Uniqlo clamshell mama/Santa brought. Mama zips up hers, her Patagonia drip. But you’re not cold.

You sit, knees together, arms hooked around em to support your backs. Your uprightness.

You want to tell her what you’ve been thinking, reading. Knausgaard and Hitler and Hitler’s mid-twenties. How uncannily they mirror yours, so far. How his ole man died in his early teens; how yours did, too, effectively. Although that ‘effectively’ is significant. Still.