I'm crying cuz I love you.

Somewhere in the lost year of the plague, a person who is very dear to me had a baby. She did this on the other side of the country, where I could not visit until all of us were vaccinated, until it was safer but never safe. This past weekend, I finally got to meet the kid. He wears her face; all of her skepticism and easily divined desire printed in smooth miniature on his very familiar features. 

I met him as I try to meet all babies: by dancing to Lizzo. He suffered me to pinch his jellyroll legs and agreeably let me swing him through 'Cuz I Love You' with its big, blowzy brass arpeggios appending the refrain, giggling madly as I pretended lose my grip on his shoulder and thigh, letting him slip but never letting him fall. 

It's been that same swing this summer, all blowzy brass and reunion. Hot vax summer and new living babies and dead cicadas in the grass. It's so much at once in the receding shadow of the last lost year, in the encroaching shadow of the variant or what's to come. Did life always feel like Indiana Jones running from the boulder? Is this just midlife barrelling down on me?

While I was visiting this dear one and her family, I won the Locus Award for best novelette. After losing the Nebula for "The Pill," I was shocked to win this one in such a field of talent. I was surrounded by people who love me, who were crying cuz they love me. 

On the July 17th, I'm doing my first live show in over a year with Bawdy Storytelling in San Francisco. Returning to the stage, returning to in-person conventions, feels momentous and still tremulous. At no time since getting vaccinated have I actually felt like this was allowed, like it was really over. It isn't over. It's just time to move on, with caution and with the understanding that nothing is promised or set. 

Looking at a brand new person with the face of one of my favorite people stamped on him made me want to tell him all this, to tell him that nothing is promised or set. He's healthy and huge for his age and I still want to tell him that nothing this pink and soft and perfect can last. I want him to know it better than I did when I chipped my teeth and ate dirt and went to loud concerts as if nothing could harm me. But I don't want him to live as though he knows it, and there's no choice between those things and it doesn't matter anyway. Not one of us listens when some old person tries to explain it. We have to get there ourselves. We all have to fall in love and come to cry in time, we all have to let our grip slip but not fail just to feel the thrill of uncertainty as we hurtle toward what is certain. 

Come here and dance with me. I feel everything too much to sit still. I'm crying cuz I love you. 

Meg