Thank you.

61 Weeks

Imagine you can barely walk. Like the dream where you can't run as fast as you need to for melting floors and moving sidewalks. You're standing in a warehouse made of concrete and noise. Everything and everyone is three times your size and three times as fast. Giant legs either completely disregard you or bend to press strange faces into your nose, speaking mostly nonsense through toothy grins, goofy voices, and coffee breath. What is coffee? "Daddy" and "Mama" are about all you can say and you're not even sure why except those two sleepy, anxious people you see every day get excited and sometimes clap when you do. Why do we clap? One of them points to a stranger holding an armful of fuzz and everyone around encircles you and giggles as you get closer to this thing they coo over and call something sounding vaguely familiar like when Mama reads to you from a picture book featuring random shapes of things with eyes. "Bunny. It's a bunny." What is a bunny? You trust and lean in anyhow, observe, then accept, and out of some distant natural instinct fall in love and look up at someone you've never met before in gratitude. What is gratitude?