Loving and letting go

Soon after I became a father, at some point into the first few months of sleepless nights and earlier-than-early mornings, I found myself thinking that my son – my tiny exquisite implacable son, who so often I couldn’t soothe through his hours of tears – was larger than me.

I felt insubstantial, old, starting to break apart; while he had so much time and potential coiled inside him, waiting to become and to keep on becoming, to continue seeing long after I had closed my eyes. It was an odd, vertiginous sensation, and also a restatement of the crushingly obvious.

There was nothing here I can still be shocking – because, from the inside, the universe is a resolutely personal and singular experience. One life, one chance to live it, floating in darkness.