Intelligence there may be in the millions: atoms of perception—they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God—but they are not souls till they acquire identity, till each one is personally itself, to possess a bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence.

How are souls to be made then? How but by the medium of a world like this, effected by three grand materials—the mind, the human heart, and the world—acting the one upon the other for years?

The world is a place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways, for the heart is the mind’s experience, the teat from which the mind or intelligence sucks its identity: as various as the lives of men are so various then become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings from the spark of his own essence.

I’m certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections—they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential beauty.

21

The city sleeps.

Magic sleep, comforting bird: you brood over the troubled sea of the mind until it’s hushed and soothed. Night of silvery enchantment, full of tumbling waves and moonlight: we welcome your merciful renovations.

But: Dazzling sun, enduring lamp of the skies, that lures us back into the labyrinthine world—why must we show gratitude for your daily resurrection, our imprisoned liberty? What doesn’t unfurl beneath your burning light for many a day but withers and dies?

My mother’s last day on earth is here, and the sun will too soon rise over the hills of the East Bay to preside over it.

22

In some parts of the world, the sun has already breached in preparation for the new day. How effortlessly the sky appears to give birth to the sun, how willingly it allows itself to be transformed in return, from a speckled nighttime indigo through a burning daybreak orange to a jubilant sunlit blue, and how confidently the sun traces its arc through the sky, blazing its fiery path around the earth—the result no doubt of all that repetition and practice, the eons of strict observance of every natural law there is.

But my mother’s pregnancy has taken a turn that few other pregnancies do. The abdominal pain she’s been suffering from since yesterday is only the beginning. The medical term is placenta abruptio. The placenta that has kept me nourished and thriving, and is only to be expelled from my mother’s body in an act of afterbirth, has begun to separate from the uterine wall, even before I am delivered to the world outside. As if it’s in a rush to sever our connection.

I’m the first to sense this, a vague discomfort, as though there’s something in the fluid enveloping me that makes me screw my face up so, eyes squeezed shut, brow furrowed. My thumb—my left thumb, for I must be left-handed—has acquired a taste that I can’t find satisfying, no matter how much I continue to suck on it.