someone else, this time

The toddler illness I wrote about last Friday lasted another half a week, and the worry longer than that, so today I'm going to share someone else's writing about their child, Lucas Mann's, with a link to an essay that completely destroyed me, but in a good way? I was already pretty destroyed by the weeks of sick toddler, so I only required a gentle nudge. But the essay is beautiful and hopeful at the same time, I hope you'll read it. Here's the opening:

In this fantasy, it’s Wimbledon and she’s trying to climb over the green wall into the bleachers to find me. Her dress is grass stained, her eyes are wet, her shoulders—always big and round and beautiful—move like gears as she reaches up into the crowd. A voice, McEnroe’s I think, is saying, We all know who she’s looking for.

In this fantasy, I can’t get through a wedding toast; her new wife is squeezing her hand as she cries because I am crying. I think we’re at the same place where my wife and I got married, but the lighting is better, softer, and there are more people so the tent doesn’t feel so big.

In this fantasy, she’s thirty and still living at home and we’ve all miraculously learned to both love and excel at gardening. 

An Essay About Tiny, Spectacular Futures Written a Week or So After a Very Damning IPCC Climate Report

See you next week.