junie & lou

...this one's for you.

what is there to tell you about life and about the world except for everything?

but let me start with this — in astronomy, for every two objects in space in orbit, there exists a period of time in which both objects are at their closest they will ever be. this is known as their “periapsis.” in any relationship you have with someone, there exists a periapsis, or a point in time where circumstances will bring you the closest you have ever been. when you both entered the world, i like to believe the periapsis between your parents and all of their friends took place. i like to think you, the babies of my friends, are what i now know the best of us to be.

for someone who’s never dreamed of motherhood, it’s crazy to me how much i think of you and love you and want nothing but the best for you. in a world where i have had to dull my capacity to care in order to survive, the love i have for the both of you was so immediate and is so strong that the fear i often have surrounding love melts away and starts to make no sense at all. every time i see you, i spend days convinced nothing else in the world matters.

dreams change, did you know? and did you know how that’s okay? or how i used to want to live in a van and travel the country, but now i want to sit across the table from my dear friends and share a story or a meal and hold you, your small hot hands, and watch you become more you.

one day we’ll get to know your biggest fears and wildest dreams. you’ll have a favorite song and a first love and a movie that will make you cry. you’ll have a reason why you don’t believe the world is good. you’ll have countless reasons why you do. you’ll get to make so many choices in your lives — the simple ones, the heartbreaking ones. we’ll be cheering you on the whole way through. watching as you become what you want to be, what you must be.

Junie ~ the day after you were born was the day i first met you — held you up to the hospital window and whispered, “welcome to the rest of your life.” i spent the rest of that day crying about almost every tiny beautiful thing. love cracks open this sad world so completely that its incompatibilities with such harshness become immediately obvious. it was hard to believe something so new and delicate and fragile could possibly survive what can often be a very cold, cruel world, but i knew we’d do all we could to show you the beauty of things too.

Louie ~ i was still living halfway across the country when you came into being. by the time i first met you, you had already begun your life. and for once it wasn’t you, but me who was nervous and shy. i wondered what all i must have missed out on and whether i would eventually become someone who might matter to you in your small world, because you became someone who mattered to my world in an instant.

one of you is barely one, the other not quite two, and you won’t remember anything about these first years — how you were born or how, in that moment, the whole world both fell in love and backed away, gave you space to become. we wait and look so hard for love, until suddenly here it is, being passed back and forth between the arms of friends, or playing lions on the brewery floor, or sitting laughing in my lap, or shyly hiding in my sweater… every bit of hope i have left in life exists because of you. because i see how much you’ve changed the world, already, just by being in it.

i watch as my friends, your parents, continue growing and teaching me so much about love — about how the ways i wanted to be loved as a child are possible because i see the ways they love you. and i hope, even if / when we, the “adults” in your life (who are still so unsure of the world ourselves), inevitably fail you, you will at least remember how much we all love you. how much we’ve changed for you. how much we’re growing still because of you — you are teaching us about the world just as much as we are teaching you, we are learning right alongside you.

i hope you know you deserve every bit of space you take up here, that your place in the world matters and that you will always belong, because no matter what there will always be someone (many someones, actually) whose life has been made better by you existing in it.

— i’m with you all the way, my sweet and smallest friends.

xx