Some of the Light Stayed On

Two in a hundred thousand, give or take. In one hippocampus, far more. They came across before you had a name, small enough to slip the wall between two bloods, and found the work that needed doing in a brain that was still being laid down: a neuron in the second layer, a cell that wraps the wires, a cell that eats what dies.

Don't call them strangers. Half of what they carry, you carry. You were inside the body they left. For a while the traffic ran both ways, and somewhere in her, if she's like most mothers, a little of you is still keeping a vessel open.

What makes the room one room was never that every brick came from the same kiln. Your own cells drift apart, copy by copy, no two neurons spelled quite alike. The room is one because the work is shared, because a signal from her cell goes on into yours without asking whose, and what you see when you look up is seen by all of it at once.

So when something fires at a face you love, it may be partly her that answers. That isn't a crowd in you. It's how the house was built: someone held the lamp while you were made, and some of the light stayed on.