all around you is the image of the child. little cherubic forms are scattered, directionless, melding together as a haze. there is one such form at mox: a baby just awoken from sleep, something that can't yet speak but tries endlessly, excitably. the two of you set forth to entertain it, taking turns talking and gesturing. you watch it, the two of you, smiling, and you watch each other watching it. you are both, in that moment, surely happier than you have been in many days. you remark later that when life has concocted a new and beautiful form of torture, you have a responsibility to at least see how it feels.
watching someone talk to a baby is so evocative. it's a kind of unique performance, a little one man show that tells you everything.
S on the couch does a classic peekaboo: fitting. strong enthusiasm, but maybe too unsteady to depart from form. you think about the kids she will homeschool, will bring to rationalist meetups and teach about copper refinement and gpu programming.
you can feel your own fear, performing. this too is fitting. cynically: something that is perhaps not meant for you, that is just out of reach.
the other day, you had been thinking about relationships as an expansion of your world, the one each person has inside their heads and lives in all the time. bringing someone in and letting them see how to feel what you feel. you think that in relationships you're maybe too prone to just being the visitor, letting yourself be brought inside another's, leaving your own one vacant. sublimation, in essence. it can be comforting to lose oneself like this. either way is of course a failure. a new thing must be built.
you wonder if this is in fact what it is like to be the child: to be the perpetual visitor. someone whose world hasn't formed yet, the baby is a fragile thing, does not exist as an entity apart. it becomes entirely subject to the world of the other.
people have an innate sense of this. that to engage with the child is to bear the weight of responsibility for creating a world for the child to rest in. this is what's so evocative, that everyone sees this responsibility. to play happily with the child is to have a positive vision for the world one could live in. to know and enact it, for years or only for a moment.