there's been love

I went to visit a friend to meet her 3-month old daughter. Ah, those little hands (with super little fingernails, as the Korean girl says in Juno), marshmallow cheeks, and toothless and yet sweet mouth! She wiggled, and it filled me up with warmth that tickled inside my heart. I was captured.

Babies do that. You look at them and see how precious they are and, all of a sudden, you feel an urge to hold them tight into your arms, press your cheek onto theirs and keep them away from all the bad things in the world. It's an instinct. It's love.

And whenever I fall in love with a baby, it gives me hope, because for every one of us alive, even if we feel nobody has ever loved us, there have been moments when someone fell in love with us. Those moments might not have been permanent. That someone might've been just a passerby. But there has been love. Someone saw us and felt the urge to protect us from all the bad things in the world. How could we survive our baby time, otherwise, being so helpless and fragile?

I believe this love might sustain us when we are desperate and feel there's no love, even if we don't remember.