The Sum

The nurse places him in my arms and the math of the world recalibrates in an instant.

I have held things heavier than this: bags of groceries, stacks of books, the flat weight of a bad day. My hands have never understood weight like this.

He is less than a gallon of milk, yet he is the sum of every ancestor I never met and the anchor of every tomorrow I will now fight for, a gravity I can feel all the way down in the soles of my shoes.