Zulieka Unpregnant!!!

Bb, pseudonymously Zulita, has arrived! In the last year, I've become an increasingly faithful reader of Zulieka's weblog, following along with the trials and tribulations of her complicated relationship with Zulieta's father and others, her nearly weightless pregnancy, and her fascinating, often sublime thoughts on the little girl growing inside her, and on the event of her pregnancy in itself. It's been a wild, and entrancing journey, as seductive in its contours as Zulieka is in hers, with and without child.

As did most of her readers, I imagine, I suspected that she had given birth this week. On the 11th, she mentioned early contractions, and then she disappeared. Daily, I checked her site for word, and with each passing day I became more certain that Bb was here, there, somewhere in Zulieka's arms in an unidentified corner of the midwest.

I'm almost alarmingly pleased that everything went well for this woman I neither do, nor ever will know. But then perhaps in counterpoint to the Richard Powers commonplace I posted below, this is an exemplum of the way the internet brings people together, however circumscribed or disguised. On the 13th, I imagine, thousands of children were born in the United States, and many more thousands around the world. None were born to the people I know in meatspace, but one was born to a virtual friend, and that's one more than I'd otherwise be able to vicariously enjoy.

So here I am, sweaty mid-apartment-cleaning of a Sunday, and I pause to raise a raw organic carrot and a tall glass of blessedly cool water to Zulieka, Zulita, and Freddy: Congratulations and Godspeed. I've no doubt that Zulita is blessed in every way. And of course thanks are due to Zulieka for sharing her journey through her pregnancy; one can only hope that amid the rigors of parenthood, she will find the time and energy to continue to bring us along as she begins the next leg of her travels.