It starts like this.

We're not friends, really, things between us are tentative and guarded, except every time we say that it's a lie. There has never been a time where we've been together where our skin hasn't held opposite but attracted magnets. Your fingers on the curve of my hip, the way mine ghost your hairline. It's a sunny day in a time where the only thing we know is that we love each other, and we have taken Tiggy to the Heath to look at the swans.

You swing her in the air. Higher, she demands, and you're huffing with laughter. I'd have quit smoking if I'd known I'd be doing this one day. Higher, she demands, she wants to see the whole world, and in the moment where you're busy telling her just exactly like her aunt she is, I catch the eye of a woman coming over the crest of the hill. She's looking at us the way strangers always look at something that isn't quite true: fondly, as though for half a second she can look at a child who looks enough like me with enough of your colouring to believe that there's good in the world, and she smiles at us. I smile back, although it feels not quite as uneasy as I think it should.

That's the first moment I realise that you're the man I want to have children with.

There are things in the middle that I don't think I can do.

The first time I realise that my belly is growing, I call you up. Photos, you demand, and when I send them you laugh at me. You look like you just ate too much, you say, and that's the start of a new cycle of our lives. Where I can't trust my body, I can't trust what is happening to me, and I need you like I've never needed anybody. You're there. The moments that matter, with women who have patient faces and kind eyes, and medical equipment I can never remember the name of, and you never forget what they do. I become your living, breathing, pickle-eating, meat addicted science experiment. I remind you that, on one of those moments that don't matter so much, the third time you complaintlessly drive me to Brick Lane in your pajamas so that I can have beigels. You did this, I tell you, and you smile.

It's the sound that fills the room. Whoosh-whoosh-burble. Whoosh-whoosh-burble. The sound of our child's heart, where he sleeps inside me. You're so certain it's a son that I stop asking questions and just hope that you're right, because you light up at the thought of your boy. Not that I think you'd have treated a girl any differently, but there's something about being right. Whoosh-whoosh-burble. You're holding my hand so tightly that I can't feel my knuckles, or I'm holding you so tightly that I don't know how to let go; the details don't matter. The entire universe is brought into focus by one single sound.

Whoosh-whoosh-burble. The first sound of the universe.

There are things in the middle that I don't think I can do.

Our parents sit in the quiet room of the pub that's full of other people celebrating their fathers. Your dad, my dad and you, with Kit in your arms, a baby that doesn't understand the significance of the story he's just heard. Your dad is regaling us, both of our dads competing with affection over the dumb shit their kids have done. He's told the story of you fingerpainting not just a card for him, but the kitchen, the hallway, and all the way up the bannister. Tiny little lovely fingerprints, he calls them, and looks at you the same way you look at our son. I fight the feeling of tears, these traitors that I spend more time hiding than ever before. My sister catches my eye and gives my hand a squeeze, mutters something about hormones, but it's more than that. It has to be more than that because with us, it always is.

The first time you strap him to your chest, the first time he takes your finger, the first time he sleeps on your chest. Everything now is a world of firsts as we fingers and thumbs our way through parenthood. I don't expect that will change, we know enough people who can confirm that you're always muddling through, always hoping to make it the best, always worrying you've gotten it wrong. Our life will be a world of tiny lovely little fingerprints with this little person who might be more like you than me, might look more like me than you, might be both of us and will also be his own little man some day. Sitting among family, I feel it all in the centre of me so keenly.

We are family and we are home, and we made this. This is ours, and we made it.