Smell the Onion

The first day I had you home from the hospital, I thought you stopped breathing. I woke up alone in the house with you. The sunlight and the painted walls cast a blue light over us, like an ominous camera filter in a B film. I tried to wake you. There was bubbly saliva between your lips but you didn’t stir. The ambulance came and went– you were fine when they arrived, awake and looking around–bless the paramedics; they were kind and unannoyed. I sat on the couch in my nightgown, hysterical, after they pulled away. Sobbing, repeating, “Don’t scare me like that baby girl, you can’t leave me. I need you.” I did not know, in those moments, if or when I would ever stop crying.

The world became both infinitely more beautiful and infinitely more terrifying in those first days.

From the second they placed you in my arms, bloody and screaming, my life was yours, were it ever required of me. The adoration of you came later, as the postpartum haze of exhaustion and narcotics and hormones wore off, and you got fat rolls on your thighs and wrists and elbows, and started to drool, and I noticed things like milk breath, and how your hair was always in a Mohawk in the mornings. And then I began to fall in love with you. Your gummy smile made my breath catch in my throat.

Looking back, I feel as if I have loved a thousand different Mayas. Each precious remembered moment, shining, discrete from each that followed.