My daughter was born at 4:34 am,
the same minute I was born
26 years,
one month,
and 26 days before.
I felt the warm, slippery crown of her skull
with my fingers
in the last moments we were one being,
and then she spilled out of me
the way something spills from a can
when the suction is broken.
She did not cry,
did not make one small sound,
but her arms flew to the air,
and I thought,
how wonderful it would be if we could all remember
that first instance of ecstatic release
having only known darkness,
a folded existence.
She was handed to me
like a tea set wrapped in a sweatshirt,
mindfully, delicately,
and her placement in my arms
came with the recognition
that my life now had a before
and an after.
There was no rush of love,
as they say,
just the momentous peace
in having met this stranger
who I had loved without knowing
from the moment she left her father
in frantic search
of her biological counterpart,
her soul joining itself.

I remember tiptoeing downstairs
at 8 years old
and watching Titanic with my parents
when I couldn’t sleep.
I remember
the acrid taste of the popcorn
that I left in the microwave too long,
the cocoon of my parents love
and our old green sofa.
And yet the details of my daughter’s birth,
the hours of exquisite pain
and visceral longing,
my memory has failed to keep.
My heart remembers
what my brain does not.
My body holds the blood memory of her.