now @jostenneil

“am i the moon to her sun? fuck no. (i could never reflect as brightly.) all i know how to be is her sky— to give her this vast expanse, maybe a rainbow or two in spring, some stars over her shoulder. —a canvas for her light that envelops me completely.”

We got storked when I was seven […] It was early in the morning, and my parents figured no one saw the baby left at the door, right? So the next morning, before the rest of us got up, my dad put the baby on a doorstep across the street. That’s illegal, once you get storked, that baby’s yours. Yeah, but my parents figured, who’s gonna know? My parents swore us to secrecy, and we waited to hear the news from across the street about their new, unexpected arrival … but it never came. They never talked about getting storked and we couldn’t ask them about it, because it would be a dead giveaway that we’d dumped the baby on them.

Things go on like it never happened. Everything was quiet for a while, and then two weeks later, I open the door, and there on that stupid welcome mat, is another baby in a basket … and I remember … I remember I almost laughed. Can you believe it? I thought it was funny, and I turned back to my mother, and I say ’Mom, we got storked again‘—Just like that little kid this morning said. My Mom, all frustrated, brought the baby in … and that’s when she realizes—

Oh, no! 

It’s the same baby! It turns out that the baby had been passed around the neighborhood for two whole weeks—each morning, left on someone else’s doorstep … only now it’s not looking too good. So, what happened to the baby? By the time it landed on our doorstep again, it was sick. It was coughing like a seal and its skin and eyes were yellow. Jaundice. A lot of babies show up at StaHo that way.

My parents brought it to the hospital, but there was nothing they could do. I was there when it died. I saw it die. I remember thinking, if a baby was going to be so unloved, why would God want it brought into the world?I didn’t know you believed in God. Anyway, since it was legally ours, we paid for the funeral. It didn’t even have a name, and my parents couldn’t bear to give it one. It was just ‘Baby Lassiter’ and even though no one had wanted it, the entire neighborhood came to the funeral. People were crying like it was their baby that had died… . And that’s when I realized that the people who were crying—they were the ones who had passed that baby around. They were the ones, just like my own parents, who had a hand in killing it.

The way I see it, it’s got nothing to do with all of that. It has to do with love… A person don’t got a soul until that person is loved. If a mother loves her baby — wants her baby —it’s got a soul from the moment she knows it’s there. The moment you’re loved, that’s when you got your soul.