Olivia

A letter from a friend…

An incredibly beautiful little girl, Olivia, was just born to my cousin. Lying upright in the hospital bed, she was cradling the baby in her arms; I had never seen a woman’s face so blissfully lost in her own world. After a minute, raising her eyes momentarily to let them rest on the horizon, she caught me staring. “Do you want to hold her?” My heart jumped. I had never held a baby. I don’t even own a cat. But, somehow, one step forward and one heart attack later my arms were the princess’ throne. She was still, she was warm, she was small. Olivia, you’re so new that you’re wrinkled! Where did you begin? Twenty minutes ago you were crying a storm on your mother’s chest, eyes closed, the umbilical cord still attached. You couldn’t have begun when the cord was cut; you were already vivid then. A couple minutes earlier you had your little head stuck outside and your little feet still inside, and jostled with every gram of energy you had. Still just as alive. A few more minutes earlier and you had the same kicks of energy, but hidden away in the womb as though playing a game of peekaboo. But, as you will soon learn, not because you can’t be seen are you not there. You must have begun earlier, then. Perhaps when your parents named you. But, I remember they changed their minds, and Sofia was your name first, weeks before you were called Olivia. So are you really Sofia or Olivia? You can’t be two people at once, with two different ages and two different minds. This is nonsense, it can’t be the name. Earlier, then. When you began to think? But exactly how many neurons does it take to think, and when exactly did you gain that number? Am I human while I sleep? Perhaps when your heart began to beat, surely. Yet why that organ and not another? Life depends on many organs, not just one of them. Those AEDs don’t say, detecting a still heart, “Stand clear of the human tissue!” It must be earlier still. But how further back can we go? There’s only one critical moment left. The moment your substance first began to work on itself. The moment your being began to stretch itself out into life and absorb the life offered it. The moment love made a third from two. That must be it. Olivia was conceived in a whisper of some hour of day or night, too discrete for even her own parents to have heard it, because it happened sometime after something else. But it was then, it had to have been then when you began.