Afterbirth

Sunset, and we are waving at a yacht full of loud, beautifully dressed people. The fog has moved in with a certain presence and siditiness, and I am plucking something out of our firstborn’s hair that resembles a human ear. Quicker than a sniff, before I can look, he’s gone skipping it across the lake, turning flips, our wild man.
You couldn’t have picked a better baby-mama. Seeing me, men on the boat run a burning hand down their zippers. Women on the balcony suck- ing their teeth and leveling their eyes—they also run a burning hand down their zippers. If I embarrass you, the strangers embarrass you more. They snap over one million pictures so our en medias res faces will stick out in photo albums across central Texas.
People around here don’t go anywhere else, I say. But you pulse the muscles in your jaw to an order and rhythm that has nothing to do with me. That’s what hacks me open every time; things that have nothing to do with me.
A phantom of our kid runs down the dock and jumps into the lake, gut first. He looks over a shoulder to see if we’re watching and terrified. I had been that way—not even tame—and everyone had adored me. This is to say that I sometimes understand your frightening jaw when I’m looking at you and you won’t look at me. Adoration leaves the one adored with the sense that he has been robbed of something, or worse, that she has been robbed by someone who isn’t fit to steal. The yacht goes deep into fog innards and quiet, and I wonder about those pictures.
But the only way to live is in adoration of someone else, and when I look at you, I have that after-happiness sensation of the heart dancing between the brains, a feeling that is too often wasted on the too young, which I am not anymore, which is why I am ready to tell you about it.