On the counter was David’s notepad.
Exact amount of formula.
Correct temperature.
Feeding instructions.
And one final note:
She likes to be held with her head slightly elevated.
I warmed the formula.
Then I picked her up exactly the way David had written.
She drank.
She was unbelievably small.
But there was something fierce about her tiny existence.
As if being alive was something she had already decided she was going to keep doing.
When she finished, I returned her to the box.
Within minutes, she was asleep.
I remained at the kitchen table.
I thought about David in the garage at two in the morning.
Then four.
Then six.
Every two hours.
Holding something small that had no one else.
I thought about all the things people carry alone because they are frightened that sharing them will somehow make them more fragile.
And how often those things would actually become easier if we simply allowed someone else to help us hold them.
I thought about seventeen years of sleeping on the same sides of the same bed.
The chipped green coffee mug.
The routines.
The habits.
The thousand tiny choices that slowly become a marriage.
And I thought about a tiny kitten beneath our back steps looking at David.
She needed someone.
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