I am 38 weeks pregnant today. I am tired. A fatigue that almost feels exquisite, boasting its own radial warmth. A tired that insomnia still deems as brittle seed pod beneath its anchor. When there isn’t sleep, I read. A steady shift of one leaning tower(to-read) to a new, equally crooked stack(read). I keep finding new things to clean and sort and organize around our home. That nesting instinct is sewn into muscle. Chris pleads with me to slow down but it’s incredibly difficult to fight the urge. So, I stack the freezer with meals for after her arrival. I rearrange every closet, donate a mountain of irrelevants. When confined to my desk for work, I switch my focus—gutting my email inbox, abolishing archives and organizing poem drafts, publishing submissions. It’s fascinating—this innate craving for order and preparation wherever I can get it. In awe. This body, goddamn. I thought I knew her. I thought lifelong athletics taught me all I needed to know about her limits and resilience.

Little one, We are weeks, if not days, from meeting. Weeks at most, which feels so wild to say. This pregnancy has felt both endless and instant. Here we are, at the end of the first part of our forever adventure. Words feel ridiculous right now--how do I do the process justice? How do I express every corner of it--the pure weather of feeling that destroyed and built me over and over again? How do I explain how deceitful the mirror felt, how every single day I surrendered. Even on the days that I refused to. Your grandfather says I've changed. He makes a point to mention it separately from anything else we are discussing, usually waiting until the end of a phone call to bring it up. He states it with a smile. When I want to know how, he doesn't have the words for it either. Where are all the words for these things going? The other day I told a close friend about your two vessel cord--how we had to go to the high risk unit for extra monitoring to make sure you were growing. I