There are so many things I’ve collected over the years, but my favorites are always the ones that mean you. Life is curation, an accruement of what and who we love, and my museum has a whole wing dedicated to you. It’s all there: every drawing and note, with the J always backwards; the peeling sticker that faded onto my phone case so fast it’s like eons passed in the days since you placed it; the piñata we made together, happy days held together by the flimsiest glue and water, layered again and again until it was strong enough to hold; the sweater I wore when I held you in my arms for the very first time, warmer than the sun and every star.

Do I dehumanize you by deifying you? Is it unfair of me, to love you with the abandon and devotion that comes of loving someone as more than what they are? You hold no answers, no grace, no supernatural power. I don’t expect you to do anything but breathe (again and again and again–) I know you’re a child, but you hold within yourself, radiating across the planet in waves so strong I am astonished when things remain the same, a hope that I have never known outside of your smile. What else is apotheosis for, if not the things that change us, make us better? Where does faith exist, if not in the way I wake up every day knowing you are still alive, even when you are much too far away for me to hear the gentle gasp within your tiny lungs?

I've never prayed for anything but you, but that doesn’t mean I’m not praying every second. I’ve only been to church willingly once, and I basked in tangible faith in the air, but it was nowhere near as holy as your bedside when we sing the hymns of Tinkle Twinkle, Haida, and Somewhere Over the Rainbow. The prayers I sent up before you came were the loneliest, sparse attempts at hope drowned in the scalding water that poured over my skin as I held nothing but air and wished and wished and wished. Part of me thought I’d never forgive you, for waiting so long to answer, but that was before you stopped dying and decided to be (re)born for real.

Like in all museums, the prize exhibits of your ephemera cannot be touched, though it’s not because I guard it behind glass or lasers. The best thing I have from you is Sister’s (b. 2016) First Smile, March 2016, joy on baby’s face: occurring on car ride to birthday dinner. The wide curve of an open mouth, barely a couple inches wide, holds within it a whirlwind of acceptance, forgiveness, and the ever-present promise for more: another smile, a louder laugh, more happiness, again and again and again as long as we live. It is the first in a long line of works, giving it the exponential power of being neverending. Even infinity must start with one, and though it is startling to initially witness, First Smile is so bright that it completely rewrites the darkness of zero.