and he told me i was holy; falla

[Falla]

Not this troublous 
Wringing of hands, 
this dark Ceiling without a star.

She breathes.
She can breathe.
She does it deep into her ribs and out across her green neck in a shutter, choked up by the want to cry. She picks herself up from her ungraceful bow, her knees stinging, finally getting a look at her – all baby bones and angles, awkward in the way her legs are too long and her head too big for her thin neck. As she should be. Somehow, unharmed; somehow untouched by her travels, or so Falla thinks and so she breathes a sigh of relief.

“It’s fine,” it is not, but she’d rather baby think so than think she is angry at her. She is, and is not. Mostly, she is relieved and still confused. And so motherhood, in its first yawning blinks, shows itself to be complicated and wrenching. “You just scared me. It’s fine.”

How do you ask someone so new to explain themselves?
(This thing they are doing is hard, for her and for the girl. This new dance.) She looks around at the prying eyes that have come to the scene like emotional vultures and her ears peel back to her neck, warning them away. This is easy. This comes to her no matter how new; maybe more so, because she knows what it is like to lose her. Never again.
“So where did you go then, hm?” She tries to allow levity into her voice. As if inquiring about a great adventure with greater interest. She seems shaken and troubled, deeply. Falla presses her muzzle into her – neck and the whorl in the middle of her forehead – to try and calm her.
It would be a scary thing, indeed. To be alone at her age.

‘Did you get lost?’
‘Did you find help out there?’
‘Did you meet anyone?’
She keeps them to herself for now, so as not to overload baby. And because, in part, the answers scare her with their potential. She looks over her, a quivering smile on her lips, inviting. She wants to know everything.

So thinks she wants to know everything.

Falla