o, god (for lucy)

Oh, God.

My friend Diana says that this is the best prayer she knows and, despite all of the resplendent, time-honored, formulaic prayers that I collect and tuck away in secret places like a child squirrels away feathers and seashells, this is the one I pray the most. It is adoration, petition, thanksgiving, and praise. Mainly petition.

Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.

This is my prayer as I brush my lips over your brother’s feverish forehead, little beads of perspiration smeared into long, wet streaks. This is the prayer I mutter (under my breath and almost as a threat) as I travel along Route 29 hoping to find a gas station. This is the prayer I make whenever the doctor is taking my blood pressure and every time my fingers are lost and groping at the wilderness in the bottom of my bag for my keys. It is also the prayer that escapes my lips (pushes through before I have even begun to trace the syllables in my mind) as I listen to the squinchsquinch sound of my feet on the linoleum and peer at two lines—one dark and one impossibly faint—that bring good tidings of great joy… a small, plastic, pharmaceutical Gabriel in a bathroom strewn with bits of laundry and humming with the sound of fluorescent light. A little Annunciation.

The first time I saw your brother he looked like a seahorse with a spine of smooth, perfect pearls. The first time I see you you look like a lima bean or a greasy thumb print. You are perfect. Each time more angular and fleshy and strange and real. I want to write some things down for you because it’s hard to find the time to love you properly (to delight in you, to savor the idea of you, to listen to the ripples you make in that thick, salty water of my belly). Everything moves so quickly. I need to write to mark the time… for both of us. I need to write to tell you things that are too precious and slippery to be entrusted to memory. How am I going to teach you to be a woman (in the noblest sense of the word) in this world?

Oh, God.