7 Sept 2009 – Happy Birthday Nena

This time 2 years ago:

You were all blue and crying and howling as if you’d just dropped out of some void only it was mamá on and our bed in the apartment overlooking Parque Lezama from the ninth floor, that bed where we lay around reading magazines and drinking coffee on Sundays and generally slept late only now it all changed with you being here; now there were three of us and it was like we’d known you already. I recognized your face.

How I wanted you to stop crying mi amor and I think that’s what I told you:”I know, I know,” like I knew that it hurts to come out from that void where it’s not really empty but full like being inside a star where your arms are solar flares stretching 100s of miles through space or maybe waterfalls. I knew it more than anything I’ve ever known in my life–that it hurts to come out through the other side into this one and there you were, blue and crying, changing to pink and crying, the umbilical cord still pulsing.

“Some of us come into the world protestando,” the doctor said.

How good it was all of us kneeling and sitting on the bed all around you, Alicia running back and forth to the kitchen to get more pastries or coffee or mate and then later champagne.

It was 3:00 am by the time Mirta left, and then later Claudia, the obstetrician. She stayed to clean up the last spots of blood from the bed while I held you and mamá showered.

Later, 4:00 am or so, Gaby came over with a bunch of flowers and was crying and it seemed like one more good thing that you’d been born in Buenos Aires where it didn’t seem strange at all but perfectly flowing for someone to come across town in a remis at 4 am with a bouquet of flowers.

Watching Mamá and Gaby sit on the bed looking at you it felt like none of us had any ages. Mamá and Gaby were two sisters sitting on a bed sharing something like they were little girls or old women. I was a kid who’d just jumped his bike over a creek and landed there in that blue-walled room with you on the bed and I kept putting my finger into your tiny hands to feel how you’d grip them which was the first hug you ever gave me.