Here are all my kin—my mother and my father, my grandmother and my grandfather, my great-grandmother in the placid wholeness of her white halo—arrayed around me. Born too early, tiny and frail, I am sleeping in every picture, and in every picture they are gathered around me, heads bent to watch me take each too-light breath, willing my lips not to turn blue again. I am too small and always cold, but my people are looking at me as if I were the sun. My parents and my grandparents and my great-grandmother, all of them, have gathered to watch over me. They are looking at me as if I were the sun, as if they had been cold every day of their lives until now.
I am the sun, but they are not the planets.
They are the universe.