Dear Ruby

Dear Ruby,

I am sorry we pissed you off with the ultrasound yesterday. It was obvious that it annoyed you because you kept slipping trying to slip away from it, to hide under a liver, a kidney, whatever. I wish the technician had captured the exact moment you gave us the finger. Through the amniotic fluid, it was clear as day....wrong finger, by the way, I will teach you to do it right someday, hopefully. You like Jan's new guitar a great deal, we can tell by the way that it wakes you up and causes you to flutter and move about. This was a very different kind of sound.
I am cursed with the knowledge of all the terrible things that can go wrong in human development, and the whole time, I was looking for telltale signs of something wrong, but my untrained eye saw nothing of the sort. Your heart is mammalian by now, your cranium is quite human, you have a spinal column, legs, lips, eyes, a visage. You sleep a lot.
I am starting to think of you by your human name, not Oblivia, forgetfullness, but Ruby, a girl destined to wear a pink tutu or to color on walls, to like dinosaurs or to want to be a princess, to own a goldfish or to decapitate barbies, or to want her barbies PERFECT, undecapitated. I feel I have met you before, we both know this, because of a dream I had years ago. This is druggie metaphysics, I know, but your gender seems to confirm that you are, in some sense, the same person I shared a three hour conversation with, in this lab room, caught between one reality and the next, between one time frame and another. The name is a perfect synthesis of your mom's and my thinking. A gemstone, yes, but countrified and ungenteel. Part of the natural world, yes, and adrift in honkeytonk energies. Ruby.