I can already feel it slipping away.
Soon I won’t remember what it was like, not knowing you.
Every day I can see my opinion of you forming into something more solid, more opaque. I keep adding a piece to your puzzle, knowing I won’t finish it ever but still seeing more and more picture nonetheless.
When you first got here I felt like a stranger had been placed on my chest. I would wake up in the middle of the night to feed you and stare down with so many questions. You were not intuitive to me. I think I was given a baby that smiled so early because I needed a baby that knew me, so I could learn to know him.
I was thrown off by you. I wobbled. I could not find my center as I distractedly watched you orbit around me.
You found your rhythm before I found mine. You led the dance.
Today I drove by the place where we saw your first ultrasound photo and I laughed, looking back at you in the back seat. Here you are! So much of you has already bloomed into personality. I lost my breath a little back then. I stared at the stranger in the photo and felt uneasy that someone I didn’t know would change me so much.
And now that feeling is almost gone. I always remember your face now. When you first got here I would sometimes get excited to see you after sleeping because I couldn’t remember what you looked like exactly. I know the sound of your laugh. You are now a more uniquely-only-you kind of strange and less could-be-anyone stranger each day.
I’m guessing someday I won’t be able to recall not knowing you. I may even think I’ve cornered the market on who “Wesley” is. I want to remember that you made me “mom”, but I did not make you, Son.
I want to remember once the illusion of time+proximity=intimacy sets in, that we were total strangers once, until we weren’t. Until one day we woke up friends.
“It turned out so right
For strangers in the night”