Warm Bodies

Well it’s a stinker in Eastern Ontario this week. Daniel’s sweaty baby body, newly risen from his bassinet, is lying beside me in bed, our new morning ritual. Not the sweaty part, though he often wakes up pretty warm from his sleepy cocoon. It is delicious to feel our skins touch, to snuggle and lock eyes and pretend, truthfully, that all is well in the world. That I did not just sleep train him, a success fed through tears and determination. I am still heartsore, but proud of us both. I know it never ends, but Mr. D, you know you can do it now! And, of course, so do I. Other than typing this, we are luxuriating in this precious, decadent moment out of time before the galumphing ball of big brotherly love soon comes tumbling into our room. Ben has been melting us all by saying “I love Daniel” a lot these days. He is rather physically demonstrative with his bro, mostly sweetly with hugs and kisses, sometimes roughly, even pinching him or pulling that fetching tuft of hair atop his baby head (it is temptingly long…). We scold him, but it won’t be long before they will be tumbling together, learning each other’s boundaries, learning how to be brothers and friends with all that entails (on hopefully a more level ground!).

Speaking of warm bodies, I have been lately reading the book with that title by Isaac Marion. We saw the film too. You know, the age-old story of beauty and the beast, a young Zombie man who falls for a pretty Living woman, set in a post-apocalyptic world about to be transformed by love. Sounds hokey, but truly it is a lovely book. Not in the banal, saccharine use of the word. For a book in the horror genre, where half the characters are walking corpses, it is lovely. Marion writes with a poetic hand. I just read a section where “R”, the paramour, is eating his new love’s ex-boyfriend’s brain (bare with me!) and relives the boyfriend’s memory of being born. In my hormonal state, and because it is beautiful, it has stayed with me, the baby’s first impression of “Her”, the soft goddess, enormous, whose voice he heard trembling through the walls all that time. See? Lovely. And these days I can just relate well to zombies as I knock into everything from being tired, grunt a lot, you know. Daniel, vibrantly alive, grunts back, his baby way of saying, “Hey Mama Bear, I want to eat your nose”, or “curry colored poop is running up the back of this charming outfit you chose” or “how about you stop typing in bed and eat MY nose!” Go for it, sweet baby D, just not in the zombie way, k?

E