My girls.

I want to write about you, and take a picture of you, and remember you just like that, a wisp, a tuft of a girl wafting through your world of colors into mine. You have an insistent way of inserting yourself, you, this tiny light that should have no weight at all -- physically you don't and yet the love that pushes its way into my arms, stubbornly, is heavy and comfortable. You smile and nuzzle; you kiss my arm, you say, "Mama," and it's just this statement of fact. I hold you there, all your colors swirling in the circle of my arms until you shimmer away, and in a blink you are gone again. Your energy! Your determination! You wear it like armor and wear it to inquire about the world, and I want to give you everything I know. But I know better. I know. Sometimes you stare up into the sky and laugh loud, for no reason that I can see, and I know you already know more than I do.

::

A second with you is the life cycle of a star sped up: a sudden glimmer in the dark, a consistent light, a bright flare, a fade back to dark. But you; you contain a whole galaxy in you, and so it's all the stars in the world contained in your tiny body. In the morning the stars are being born in you, and through the day some die and some are reborn, and it is this constant process so that to be near you is to always gaze in wonder at the life flaring inside of you. How exhausting! For you, for me. I am powerless against the sheer force of you because everything you do, you do intensely. In the face of sadness you are the saddest slip of nothing the world has ever seen, and in happiness you are joy wrapped in rainbows, shooting sparklers. Only in love are you gentle, and quick to give as you get. For all your fire and all your life you are content to arrange yourself as part of my own skin, and all quiet and still, whisper "I love you, too," before I can even say a thing.