To My Future Son
I imagine myself sitting on a chair, working. You come running towards me, curve your tiny hand around my right hand, and squeal: “Daddy, I wanna fly!” I hold you up by the arms, lift you up, and make you fly like one of those dad planes that parents do.
It’s such a mundane thing. And yet in these tiny moments of mundanity, my entire universe is contained.
I spent so many days and so many nights fantasizing about all the fun games we’ll play when you come here, my future son.
I love you so much. You have no idea.
When I was in my twenties, the things I tried to protect most fiercely were my freedom and autonomy, my weekends and the time I spent with people. I was trying to optimize everything down to the last hour.
Now I think of you. And how horribly inefficient my life is going to be: ruled not by my autonomy, but by your whims, your desires, your peculiar interests.
I am already thinking how I will teach you snowboarding. I imagine your first day of school, and how you kind of don’t want to go. I keep looking at you teary eyed as you try to walk away.
I imagine looking at your mother and just melting, it’s almost as if God put her on earth just for us and absolutely nothing else.
I don’t know who she is yet. But I know she’s out there.
Life used to be so selfish. Still is. But when I started thinking of you, I am never the same again.
I now see love for what it is. It is the greatest responsibility in the world.
It doesn’t happen often. It is incredibly rare. In tiny slivers, love is everywhere if you look for it. But you have to open your heart.
When you apply objective reason to the question of love, you’re insulting its depth and intensity. True love should turn you upside down, inside out. Rip your guts out.
I spend many days and nights thinking of you, my son. I know you are going to come.
You have changed me in so many ways, and you’re not even here yet. I can only imagine all the things you’ll do when you do come.
You are the reason I was here for all these years of anger. And now I finally realize how much my father sacrificed. He gave up his dreams, his life, and his joy to raise me.
My love for you has made me from a petty man, to someone who is kneeling on the edge of self-transcendence.
There is no rhyme or reason to this. I cannot justify this.
Some people say I am suffering from baby fever.
But I’ve had fevers before. I know what it’s like to like something for a few months. Fevers come and go.
This one hasn’t gone for a year and a half.
I don’t think this is a fever.
I always thought babies were cute. But I just never knew how much they could overwhelm you and for how long. Something inside of me changed so permanently.
I feel like I’m not in a fever. I feel like I’m in a coma. I feel like I got hit by a truck and then fell into a coma. A coma of love. And this coma, I can never get out of.
I spend many parts of my lonely days fantasizing about you running around me, being giggly and giddy without a care in the world, just wanting to be with me.
You’re looking at me. I’m your whole universe because that’s all you know.
And I look at you, you’re two years old.
I have seen so many things. I have seen the world. I’ve traveled everywhere.
And yet when I look at you and mommy in this tiny little room that I’m in, I know for sure in my heart:
You are my whole universe.
