Happy Birthday Zoey Sakura

When I wake up my daughter will be four years old. Four years since that day when the midwives asked me if I cared to cut the umbilical cord and I said, "uhmm, no thanks," but did anyway. Four years since that first night at home and the 2am oh-my-God what did we think we were doing realization? Four mesmerizing years of becoming softer every day, of swelling with some indefinable love-pride combination, of becoming more of a man than I ever thought I could be, and all because of a small child. It's been four years of losing myself in someone else, and it's been so much more than my capacity for wonder and love and awe.

Happy Birthday Zed. Four years ago you breathed in a snowy evening for the first time ever, and in the process of finding your first breath you stole mine away.

We've dragged you to everything from Pacific islands to NCAA Tournament games, you called a single room in Waikiki home, an apartment in Brooklyn not much bigger by the same name, and you've logged about forty or so hours on planes. Not bad. You've made friends from Samoa to Manhattan, and kissed at least one boy that I know of, and you haven't even started school. You're a pretty special something, I know that.

As the clock flips past midnight it strikes me that I'll be loving you at least this much until I have no more breath left in me, on some distant snowy midnight when I leave this planet remembering the day that you came into it.

You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? That’s where I’ll always love you. That’s where I’ll be waiting.