I’ve written before about the moment when Roby was born, and I’ll write about it again. It was as though the axis of the earth turned beneath me, as though time itself was not so much rewound or accelerated or slowed, but the very axis of time, the point of beginning was adjusted.

I hadn’t yet realized it, but up until that moment the film was in the projector, but it was just floppin’ around, spinning into and from nowhere, it had only just caught, right then, that was the beginning. 

I felt tired today. I built some raised beds for the garden, I put in a post for the door to the chicken yard, I cleaned. It occurred to me that maybe I feel more tired than I use to. That back when I was doing yard work last summer, maybe I was less spent because Roby wasn’t around. I speculated that that might have been true but in truth, I had no idea. 

It’s not so much that I couldn’t remember, as the feeling eluded me. Feeling and memory often come hadn in hand and while I could understand how much I got done I could not remember how tired I felt. 

That might be humanity’s super power. We can’t feel into or out of things very well, at least not in a way that casts our current circumstances in a bad light. It’s why women can go through child birth multiple times, they forget. 

Rationally they know what it was like, but they can forget the feeling of it. I forget the feeling of not being Roby’s dad. In the same way that she has no access to a universe where I’m not her dad, I’m blind to such a place.

And thank goodness.