Glass And Peace

Chapter 1. Songbird's Eggs.

“Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.”

― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders .

I'll try to explain, but you'll know already, if you have children. If not, don't worry, there are no graphic descriptions of the birth, no clichéd comparisons of our daughter to her parents, not even one utterance of joy unbound, as few words were spoken that night. In fact I had found it almost impossible to speak, rendered speechless by terror and wonder. This was fine, as Natalie wasn't up for a conversation either. And it turns out she was feeling the same.

The first second of the birth of the Universe is remarkable. The proto-Universe begins unimaginably hot, dense and turbulent, massless and formless. Just one billion billion billionth of a second later the forces of nature break out creating space and time. By the end of one second - a single second since time began - all the building blocks of matter exist. These quarks - their variants labelled by playful particle physicists “Up, Down, Left, Right, Strange and Charmed”, would become our world: the world of oceans and deserts, ice and fire, living things and lifeless things, glass and steel. Of butterflies and songbirds' eggs, human hearts and dreams, of miracles and monsters. And it only took a second.

The cheerful, ruddy-faced, slate-grey suited nurse hands me my baby, this girl we will call Lilie after Nat's favourite bloom, French spelling in homage to our regular August escape. Snuffling and grasping, Lilie finds my middle finger, pulls it close and suckles quietly; I look on her downy-haired scalp, take in her scent of musk and citrus and vanilla and something unmistakably of Natalie, on this new life that seconds ago was massless and formless, and it hits me.

The universe has begun. This is our personal Big Bang. Our lives were hot and dense, full of laughter, life and love, friends and family. They were turbulent too, packed with meetings, schedules, lists - hell did we have lists, we even had lists of lists - deadlines, dates, deaths, hens, stags, weddings, divorces. Far too many divorces, so fragile are hearts and dreams. But our lives, however full they had seemed, were massless and formless. This is life. This beginning, our newly unleashed force of nature, our own collection of quarks, strange and charmed, the beginning of another story of miracles and monsters. This is the beginning of time. 

The emotions flood in, fragments of thought, fleet as shooting stars cross my conscious plane and retreat irretrievably, vivid emotions, each overwhelming individually, become unbearable in concert, crashing upon me until I fear I might drown under the relentless cataract of sensations. Relief, elation, pride and shock are joined by the most desperate, unexpected, momentary but startlingly dark fear: the brief and terrifying realisation that this fragile thing, this songbird's egg made flesh in my arms depends entirely on us; lives or dies on our whims. I’m abruptly aware my fragile heart might burst with terror and wonder, when the torrent of intense sensations subsides. I see myself in the night-darkened glass of the window staring wild-eyed and gasping, I’m grasping for words that refuse to come: how can I explain the inexplicable? I feel I must try, the last – how long? – ten seconds, fifteen, a lifetime? – were the most remarkable of my life, there was agony and ecstasy, pride and pain but what else, and why such dark, cloying terror? But Natalie saves me from searching for sense in the insensible, reaches out, places a finger on my lips and whispers the only words to pass between us that night: “Hush now. It’s OK. I felt it too.”