The sum of all our parts

For now, you are dark and unseen, a swirling mass of limbs and brain and water-filled lungs. But already you've formed into what you will be, your path set before you on an immovable, unchangable double-helixed map, a blueprint of your being. Just as the two before, you will borrow, inherit, receive what we have to give, imperfect as those offerings may be. The nearsighted eyes, the freckled skin, the shape of a jaw carved just so below a wide, full mouth.

And later, more:the crinkles on your nose that appear when mischief is afoot, the thick mop of hair as dark as your eyes, the teeth that grow in like a carbon copy of the row in my very own smile.

These fragments of our fully grown selves combine and blend and take on a new life as we watch our stride come alive in legs much smaller and hear our laugh from bellies that are not our own.

We wait for all these things to come, out here where the light shows us the sum of all our parts.