At the table across from me a little girl sits hunched over a crayon sketch, her brow furrowed in pure concentration, nothing in the world existing outside of the carroty-orange slopes on her page. A cup of hot chocolate leaves a milky stain in the corner. Her brother isn’t allowed to look too closely at the drawing, but the milky ring she doesn’t mind. She sketches around it, sipping haphazardly with the kind of fluid, unselfconscious confidence reserved for dancers or young children.
To her right sit two adults, presumably her parents. Every now and then, a loving eye flicks her way. A proud smile.
And I find myself wondering: what was it that made these two people feel safe enough to create life together? How did they meet? Did he buy her coffee on their first date? Take her dancing at an underground jazz club? Or did they bump into each other in a park, her scarf pulled loose by the wind, him running to catch it? Or was it a late-night, boozy right swipe, a few fumbling texts and a dive bar with cheap beer?
What even is this shared madness… this tender, reckless thing we call love?
Can it exist in the span of a few days? Contained, complete, safe from the mundanity of brushing teeth side by side, wiping children’s mouths, eating in front of the television? Or can we only call it love when it’s endured? When it stays after the magic softens?
And how does it change when you create a little human together? Something that can tether you or come between you. Something that becomes the proof or the erasure.
I know nothing of any of this. All I know is that I’m twenty-four, and I woke up today in a city that’s slowly starting to feel familiar. I know its rhythms now. The smell of pho charring on the street corners. The heat, a welcome envelopment that I don’t fight anymore.
I love this sweet middle, when the newness starts to wear off, when strangeness gives way to ritual.
Every day at noon, I walk to the same local restaurant. I know the names of the mother and son who run it, but not the name of the place itself, only that it’s the one with the red tablecloths across from the flashing BEER sign. I sit down and they bring me eggs, a coconut, stir-fried vegetables, no need to ask.
Then I wander to the café-slash-coworking space around the corner, where they start preparing my black Vietnamese coffee the moment I open the door.
Then I write. I think. I take video calls on my little laptop with people far away who care about KPIs and automations and SEO rankings.
And sometimes, I feel like I’m play pretending at being an adult. Like I’ll blink and wake up back on the farm where I grew up. Dark, cold, the alarm clock buzzing, and it’ll be time to get ready for school again.
Being an adult is strange. I have a job, a preferred wine, friends of all ages. I know which colours suit my skin tone, I can buy lingerie without blushing, I can navigate public transport in foreign cities without crying.
But I still know nothing about taxes. Or investing. Or insurance. Or the wild fluctuations of the human heart.
Do any of us?
And how, then, do some people feel so sure of it all that they decide to make another human being?
What must you do, or what must you know, to give a child that same lovely frown of concentration, scribbling away with the pure unbothered focus of someone loved?
Sometimes I think we are all very brave. We swim in oceans, we climb mountains, we talk to strangers, we get into big metal machines hurtling through the sky, we create, we sing karaoke. We say things like I love you, I need you, I can’t do this anymore.
We trust, we weep, we leap. Again and again, we throw ourselves into the wild, thrumming storm of life.
The great, ordinary courage of being alive.
And then one day, you look up. And a little girl is looking back at you, crayon in hand, catching you mid-thought, fingers hovering over the keyboard.
She smiles knowingly. And a flicker of recognition tightens your throat.
You recognize her eyes – not quite blue, not quite green. You know the dip of her chin. The unruly corners of her eyebrows. You know that in five years, she’ll hate them. She’ll cry in the bathroom after trying to fix them with kitchen scissors. And five years after that, she’ll move away from the parents who love her so much, to study philosophy in old lecture halls and talk about the meaning of everything.
She’ll fall in love and she’ll hurt. She’ll learn how to buy lingerie without blushing. She’ll learn how to navigate public transport in foreign cities without crying. But she’ll never quite grasp taxes.
The little artist’s mother walks over and rests a hand on her shoulder, leaning in to admire the drawing. It’s a plane. A big metal machine hurtling through the sky.
The woman looks up at her husband, and they share a quiet smile. Something wordless passes between them, tender and earned.
And somehow then, I know. The story is coming back to me now.
It wasn’t a croissant or a scarf or a dive bar. It was two groups of friends sitting on opposite sides of a pool. Two pairs of sunglasses. Two sets of hidden eyes watching each other. A phone call. A big white dress. I’ve heard this story many times before.
And again I wonder, how did they know? When did they decide to create this little girl? Did they feel ready? Did they have any idea she’d grow into someone who would sit in foreign cafés, sip black coffee, and write about planes and love and longing? That one day, she’d look up from her keyboard and see her own beginning staring back at her, soft-cheeked, crayon-stained and alive?
Did they ever know enough about the human heart – or taxes – for all of that?
Still, we fall, we trust, we say yes, we say no, walk away, come back, answer the phone call. We scribble planes on paper and call it dreaming.
All without knowing where any of it will lead.
The great, ordinary courage of being alive.
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