Gumption

It's the little things that save us from the abyss. A memory, a smile or a moment of honesty and humanity in an interview that seems to be going bad, a deep breath in precisely the moment when you can't, a thought that sustains us against how life, like a bad wife, batters us.

I remember my nephew when he was small. My sister had to go somewhere that day, and so she rose at dawn and asked me to lay down beside him so he wouldn't be alarmed when he woke up. I did. He was.

Though it was still too dark out to see, upon waking he took a look at my face, watching him with a small smile, watching this little human being that took a C-section after 10+ hours of my sister's labor, and he wailed and wailed and wailed. I wasn't his mother. I didn't smell like her, nor look like her, nor wasn't her. I tried calming him down, practicing the hold I finally had the guts to do at the hospital when he was born - 6 hours after he was born - I was so afraid to touch him for fear of breaking something so new and so precious. The first thing I noticed when they brought him in in that hospital room was that he has purple soles - and me and my mother were worried for an unreasonably long time before we realized that that hospital issued birth certificates signed with newborn babies' soles instead of anything else. That morning he looked at me and he sounded like his world was ending.

So that day of morning wails and non-mother faces I took him outside - he just learned how to walk - and wearing a shirt somewhat too big for him he tried the stairs, and the road, and finally the monument that serves as the roundabout to where roads meet at the place where we lived. It was a military camp, and we're still caught in a legal battle over whether we could renovate houses. The lawsuit was addressed to my father, whose name the institution my father served for a dozen years misspelled, and my mother and I sat through last week's meeting the way we always do with people - silently, watching everyone, wondering why everyone couldn't just leave us alone. I took her to the clinic after that, hungover, impotently wanting to be better, more, more powerful, so everyone could just leave us alone. My family needed nothing but be left alone. They didn't bother anybody. 

After my nephew got tired of the monument he started back, always pausing to look back and see if I was following him. I was. When he got to the garden, he proceeded to massacre the money tree plants, picking their red fruit and throwing them on the ground, watching me watch him, wondering what I would tell my mother later on, knowing that, as always, my mother would resignedly and lovingly wonder whether adulthood just didn't happen to me. Although, of course, the plants were fine, they would always bear fruit. 

My sister sent me a picture of my nephew today, all 5 feet 7 inches of him, in a suit, with a pale pink tie. He has a prom on Friday, and I am 5 feet 3 inches. I told him to stop growing, because he was the nephew I had who, after not wanting to part with a stuffed bunny, tied its over-long ears around his neck and said, "But he needs me." This was the nephew I had who drew 6 circles and called it a fire truck. This was a person who told me how some girl broke his heart, who I tutored as to how the physiological heart worked, who told me how some girls he didn't find worth his heart, proverbial or physiological. This was a person who I can only helplessly watch be in time, and grow, and be beautiful, and be broken, and die, and be immortal.

It's the little things that save us from the abyss.

And because they do that, they are not little, and the abyss is a crack.