Tonight I feel like I am watching a movie. One in which some devastating injustice is taking place but nobody in the film believes it, or cares, or both. And naturally, since the director has done well, I am angered at the travesty, the unfairness, but I am helpless, at the whim of the storyboard. Yet, slowly I remember I am not watching a movie. I am watching my wife. I am watching her nurse our baby, tears like marbles colliding down her face, where bigger marbles spill. Where I watch a sea of marbles, sighing on the tide, the rising, falling of great tear waves, and the baby oblivious, and me helpless, watch her weep with pearls of milk curling in her lips. And it is all a movie because I am helpless, because my years of manhood have failed to prepare me to do anything more important than be in mere awe of this thing, this painful joy of the swells of motherhood enlivened here beneath my eye’s flaring, stagnant lens. Oh God, has beauty ever gazed on life so sweet as this soft weeping?

The end of just us. Everything is different now. Not just the moments but the unwavering precision of being. The depth of gravity is validated; it’s been valet-parked amid the aisles of handsome memories we’ve carefully stowed in our showroom minds. Those persnickety details, plumbed and pored through historian fingers, are fleeting. Like how little we slept last night, or how sweetly puckered is a nipple, or a dimpled butt cheek, or a pair of baby lips that cusp and coo. They are each devoid of need Or circumstance. Our everythings have altered. Skewed their orbit and shot skyward through that great, dark blossoming orchard of stars by the bushel. We ourselves are more than diaper changing. We are not just us. The us we are is cavernous. It is vast. And it is us. But we will never be just us again.