You feared that you would love my brother more. But terribly, you would love each new child as you love me, as you love him, with proprioceptive selfishness; you could grow a new child each year like a new tender limb budding from your body. Love does not spread thin; it is not time, to be allotted, not food, to be shared until the plate is empty. That dream in which your house grows extra rooms to hold the books you have never written? That is love; and like the dream you cannot choose when it comes; you are a tangle of ganglions and you will fire. You are as boring as dawn: we knew with precision that the sun would rise at 6:44 am and that your child would be to you another limb, capable of pleasure, strength, pain. So the morning sky was clear; so my eyes for the moment are blue; these are incidentals of light. You are only the next of billions to feel in your body the shock of your baby’s first breath. You can imagine the dislocation of the shoulder, your arm visibly out of true. Now think of your body if I were taken. Think of me absent; you take a drink of water, feel ice against your lips. That shiver; you would think, no—is she cold?