One Arm, each.

Love arrives like an envelope of acceptance you've been waiting for, all your life.

He slips through the door like an envelope of acceptance I’ve been waiting for. I fold him into my waiting arms and sigh into his knit grey pullover. He smells of chocolate and car. The weight of the week falls off our shoulders like a rolling stone. My fist bunches into the fabric of his shirt, and I do not let go. In this household, we follow the Disneyland rule of never breaking free from a hug that someone initiates, unless they let go first. The rule is passe, just an excuse to hold onto warmth longer, press tired faces into the fabric of each other’s clothes, and let the exhaustion pool under our feet as everything melts away like ice on a grill. God, I wish I could afford therapy, but in this economy, I pin all my hopes on the warmth of his embraces and the way he makes my skin colour when his eyes wash over my face in thick brushy strokes of desire, desire, desire. Being wanted and being loved could cure me of all my illnesses. Being his could be my absolution. I feed him from my hands. He eats, and it warms my heart at how easy love can be when it is shared from one plate every night. We make the bed together, we watch the stars together, we put our fussy child to bed together, we read her picture books together, we plan her night routine together and sing her songs until she drops asleep—and at night she insists she will only sleep in my arms or stay up until I carry her, and some days she will only sleep over my shoulders, and he stays up with me on those days. I wean her off milk, and it breaks my heart to pat her to sleep on nights I’d have overfed her to sleep in. He sings her to sleep on those days; she sleeps faster than she ever does when I put her to sleep. She curls like a bracket around his middle and he lets me sleep on the other arm, we as a family of two have claimed him as ours, especially the hands, I tell you, those hands are ours, to hold and to keep, to love and to be fed from, to hug and to kiss and to paint with (and on) and to go to sleep on. Those hands are mine to cherish and keep for all time. He lies on the bed, stretched out like Da Vinci’s anatomy outline, we claim an arm each underneath our heads, he talks of lenses and shots he would like to see this scene from, a perpetual third eye, always looming around us, unthreatening. It watches us lovingly from afar, a mother’s eye, an eagle’s eye, wings stretched out, unfettered, ready to defend, to protect, to fly. We sometimes set up the phone like a makeshift baby monitor, beside a pillow fort we build around her sleeping form as we disappear to the veranda for a quick smoke. We kiss between smoke rings and whispers, and still her unsettling tossing and turning will fall like a secret in the whorls of his ears alone, and he will drop everything to be by her side. We come back from smoke breaks to look at her angelic face. Sleeping, she is always cherubic, pristine, and a God-like halo circles around her in silvery tones of untouched innocence. He kisses her cheek and looks at her lovingly. Last night, he asked me if we could have a few more babies. My heart welled before my eyes did. He said, there is a certain straightness that babies bring out of you, despite the routines and difficult nights, and in many ways, he said, that togetherness brought him peace. Last night, I slept with the tears on my cheeks drying up still, I slept on the crook of his arm and woke up somewhere near his middle, our child entwined into his other arm, we’d shifted and turned and found each other in the middle of chaotic sleep and on his face, played a smile, so small, so innocent, so darling and so subtle, that you blink and it’d be lost to the world and so I left him at that, undisturbed. My kiss lands softly on his forehead, just so the ghost of a smile could linger. He slept on, eyes darting inside thin eyelids, a happy smile dying at the corner of his lips, a third eye welling up, a happy sigh at the drone shot of one little, happy family of three.