to the twins

i am writing you this on your almost three week birthday. im not sure when youll read it, maybe when youre 16, or 18, or maybe when you graduate college. i want your mom to decide that. she will know when you are ready to need it.
i am writing you this because i havent met you yet, but i already love you, and there are very few people alive now who i love without ever having met. in fact i think there is only one person who i already love who i havent met yet besides the two of you, and that person is the one i sort of already know. hes the one i feel in my fingertips when words roar out of me, hes the one that will never feel like waiting. but this is beside the point, and hopefully by the time you read this you and i will both know him.
i am writing you this because i am putting hopes in the two of you. hopes, not expectations. i hope for you that every life stabbing thing that happens ends up being poetry. i hope for you that you have memories which feel unreal in their girth, which feel so beautiful and so scintillating that no matter how long you live they will always feel bigger than you. i hope for you that you will one day know where you came from, the truth of the place and the woman and the life that bore you, the courage and strength and purity and the perfection that you are now part of. i hope for you that life feels like millions of vast worlds, that sometimes you feel you cant conceive of it, that you cant contain it, that it cant contain itself. i hope for you that you never get bored, that you can always find some new thing to touch, to understand, to love.
i hope for you that one day you will know of the time you were born, of what was happening in the weeks before you were carried out of your mothers stomach. im not sure if any one person can tell you these things, about the fact that right now the only hope i can muster is the hope i place in two newborn babies, two babies who cant smile yet, who only weigh five pounds each. two babies who i have heard murmuring in the background of phone conversations, two babies whose tiny fingers i have only seen in photographs given to me by the internet. im not sure if i want to tell you, though i am sure you need to know this--right now, in terms of the world, i am as hopeless as i ever have been. i am terrified and appalled and i am disgusted to the point of wanting to simply ignore it. to simply say, its not happening here. its happening in lousiana and mississippi and pakistan and iraq and darfur but it isnt happening here, to me, as i write on my macintosh six floors above the wet west village pavement. so then, it isnt happening.
i hope you remember that it does happen. that it was happening then and that something equally as scary will probably happen to the world in the course of your lifetime. i hope you live your lives in a way that no matter what is out of your control, no matter what course the world seems to be taking despite your heart pulling it the other way, you can forgive it. you can forgive the world without being apathetic to injustice. you can forgive the world without being silent when you shouldnt. you can forgive the world even when it seems like the world has used up all its forgiveness on the people who least deserve it. you can forgive the world.
i forgave the world on september 24th 2005, the day you both were born. i gave in a little bit, i said but look! look what goodness there is! you two reminded me that the world is different from life. the world can seem to be chasing you, you and everything you know to be true, but that your life can be a testament to those truths, and you can live in a way, no matter where the world tries to take you, that justifies being born. the glory of being born at all.
live in a way that justifies being born, boys. live so much and so hard that at the end, the only wish you have is that life goes on.
i love you both. you have renewed my hope in the world and in life.

i cant wait to meet you.