Everything Changes

concentric circles on the back of her terry pajamas and she closes her eyes. Sophie’s face in repose is a study in circles; her round cheek, her closed eye, her puckered mouth. Effortless, rounded perfection, unmarred by a single worry or impure thought. Looking down at her, I can feel the violence in my belly start to abate, and I’m overwhelmed by a rush of love that causes me to brush her cheek softly with my fingers. “I love you, kiddo,” I say softly. Her breathing has changed already, slowing down as she drifts into warm, liquid sleep. I get down on my knees to listen to her breathe, and I can feel my own breath catch in my throat as the surprised tears well up in my eyes, the overflow running down my cheeks and landing in little dark spots on the blue carpet. “What am I going to do?” I whisper to her in the dim silence of the bedroom. I watch her sleep through the vertical slats of the crib, like a prisoner staring through a tiny cell window for his only glimpse of the sun. She’s the only perfect thing in my life, and she’s not even mine.

    Tamara calls over a neighbor’s kid to babysit so she can drive me home. I sit in the passenger seat, watching the animated shadows from passing highway lights play across the delicate features of her face.
    “What?” she says, self-consciously running her fingers through her hair.
    “What?”
    “What are you looking at?”
    If I could tell her the truth, I would say I’m looking for flaws. Because that’s what you do when you’re in love with someone you don’t want to be in love with. You look for imperfections in their skin, oddities in their features. You picture how they will age, where time will tarnish them. You try to catch them at harsh angles, discern some measure of awkwardness where their limbs connect to their trunks. You search for these deficiencies with an air of desperation, ready to lay claim to whatever you find, to inflate it grotesquely in your mind, and in doing so set yourself free.
    I would say that I’m paralyzed, that I see things I can’t reach for, have itches I can’t scratch. And then there are the parts of me that I can’t feel anymore at all. That my days are filled with a quiet dread that has as much to do with her, or at least the potential of her, as it does with that foreign mass trespassing in my bladder. That I’m so in love with her that I can’t breathe, and that it’s become the only color in my universe, a deep blood-red, rendering everything and everyone else in black-and-white, and that I don’t want to live in black-and-white, but I’m terrified that it’s where I’ll end up anyway.
    I would tell her that I love her from the core of my being, that she answers yearnings in me I never knew I had.
    I would insist that none of this can be trusted. Because she’s a mess and I’m a mess and she’s alone and shaken and I might be sick, and after all she’s been through, how could I do that to her, and there are so many ways for this to be a disaster, for it to be all wrong and make no sense. That it may be nothing more than a colossal accident of convenience and transference, a subtle transposition of fears and wants, the random synthesis of a savior complex and desperate grief, wrapped up in loneliness and tied with a thick red bow of unmitigated lust.
    And I would tell her that even though it can’t be trusted, I do anyway.
    I want to tell her. Because she already knows. If she had any doubts, that insane kiss yesterday should have put them to bed. So if she knows, why the hell can’t I say it? Probably, I think, because raw acknowledgment would compel us to address it, and doing so would hurl us headlong back into our separate realities. I can’t be hers, and even if I could, she’s not ready to be mine, and what if she was and I went ahead and got married anyway, or I could be hers and she wasn’t up for it. Somehow, discussing it would turn it into a promise, broken before it was even made, and after a disappointment like that we could never go back to the sweet, untouchable love that now courses through our collective veins.
    So I say nothing. And she takes her hand off the gearshift and places it on my arm, just like that, and we ride the rest of the way in a complex but uncomplicated silence, the atmosphere in her Volvo thick with forbidden thoughts. She double-parks in front of the brownstone and we sit together for a moment, looking out our respective windows at the night.
    “I’m