Your children are not your children.
It's pretty much an accident that leads to Larry finding his children. It involves curiously clicking an ad, browsing around an adoption photo listing site, and eventually landing at one particular listing.
He reads the short page. A brother and sister, twelve and eleven, given up after their mother discovered she'd transmitted HIV to her daughter while carrying her. Waiting for a home.
Larry doesn't want to believe they're his, because they're just pictures, and adoption is complicated, and he's just one man and not equipped to have children.
But his heart knows. Their souls were meant to find him.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
Larry spends months secretly researching the adoption process and raising HIV positive children after that.
He thinks of his own advancing age, and the financial realities of adoption, and of if they could ever love him.
He asks himself if he'd be good enough for them, if he could be a good parent when he's barely grounded to this planet.
In the end, Larry realises that people have been making parenting work long before him and will continue to long after him. He doesn't need to be the perfect father, he just has to be able and willing.
They come through you but not from you,
Larry tells Alan first.
Alan listens patiently as Larry speaks of his worries as he begins the adoption process, that things might go wrong, that he might not have them. That he might not be ready, that he has no experience raising children of his own.
Alan's face is that of a person thinking a very uncomfortable thought when he interrupts Larry right there. "We both know that's not true," he says. "Charlie has grown into a wonderful man."
"But Charles is not my son," Larry offers, puzzled.
Alan nods. "Yet you raised him," he answers. "You'd raise them too."
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
Larry spends a week working through a safety checklist for his house before the home visit portion of the home study.
He wonders if he's might be getting a bit excessive when he adds a first aid kit to each room, but eventually decides that he prefers knowing they're around, for the future where he might need them.
He scrubs every corner, reorganises the furniture twice, and even goes as far as buying a few non-white food items for the fridge.
The finishing touch is a small framed photo sitting on his desk, Sophia and Alexander's faces smiling at him.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
Charlie and Amita are reluctantly supportive of his effort. Larry thinks, not without the slightest bit of resentment, that it's not entirely fair that Charlie has grown up to judge the way he lives.
He knows that Charlie loves him and respects his work, but he's always been a standard to be held against in the lifestyle department. "Don't be like Larry."
Larry ponders the vast universe, the fact that he's seen far more of it than most people, and how that's just a tiny portion of all that exists in the great beyond.
He thinks back to when Charlie was his student, alone and afraid, who looked up to him greatly, and to when he grew into a man who would think of Larry as strange. It hurts him, just a bit, to know that they've lost that past forever.
But still Larry loves him, as any parent would.
For they have their own thoughts.
Megan is his unexpected ally. Their romance having long since faded away, he debates telling her of this new development in his life.
But where the romance was now there is a gentle, patient, and accepting friendship. He tells her of the love in his heart for these children, of all the fears in his mind, of the pain of waiting.
He tells her that he imagines their souls somewhere out there in the eternities, and wonders how long it took them to be born onto the Earth. He tells her about the vast and beautiful past they (the same as all things) are made of; a growing universe that nurtures all things into existence and destroys all things when they are finished being.
He tells her that it comforts him, thinking that they have existed so long to meet each other. That if he's waited this long, this brief intervening time is nothing but the tiniest of blips in time.
They talk about the life before him, the adjustment ahead, and the fact that she'll always be there for him.
She tells him how happy she is for him, that she'll visit, and that he's doing the right thing.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
Larry meets with the paediatric infectious disease program team in advance to get an idea of who and what they're going to be working with.
He learns about the frequency of clinic visits that will be needed, the tests involved, and the many specialists available to offer comprehensive physical and psychological care for Sophie as they deal with her diagnosis.
It's reassuring to hear them talk about how many healthy children with HIV they care for, how many children have grown out of their program and moved on to become healthy adults with relatively normal futures.
It gives him hope.
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
Larry visits them.
It's a long day and a half of flights and connections before he finally arrives at the airport two hours from the orphanage they live in. It's another day of settling in before he's actually allowed to visit them.
They're bigger than the pictures he had, thirteen and twelve now.
It isn't easy, because they're still strangers, and the back of Larry's mind is still worried that this will all fall apart.
After the last of the paperwork goes through and his case worker tells him that they're really his, Larry finally takes them home and breathes.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
Their English skills aren't quite up to the impression he'd been given from their orphanage, something his research had already lead him to accept the possibility of.
Larry adapts as he learns to speak with them. At the same time, he helps them adapt to their new country, language, and culture.
It's skittish, the first few months. They too seem to remain convinced that the rug might be pulled up from under them at any moment.
He introduces his friends and family over time, gently mindful of the fact that bonding does not happen in a day.
Larry is patient.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
A vibrant and often wilful personality begins to show itself in Alexander with time and opportunities. Larry enrols him in sport, in chess matches, in a pottery class, helps him search for the joy in his heart.
Sophia's growth is slower. Larry tells himself that outrage has no purpose when their first clinic visit reveals that she likely should have been on ARV therapy for quite some while but hasn't been. It's quickly rectified, a twice daily schedule of pills introduced to their lives. Eventually, she also goes to the classes, begins to find the person that she wants to be under these new circumstances.
The three of them end up in weekly therapy to help them get through the adjustment to this new reality. Larry spends hours during the evenings helping them review their homework as they both struggle to catch up.
He takes them out to gaze into the distant universe and encourages their wonder.
Larry calms the burning need to connect with his children with the thought that all relationships take time, and with the acceptance that they are not his to own, but merely companions on their own journeys. Temporarily closer, right where they should be.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
Alexander turns out to be the artist of the family. Larry teaches him of the great painters of the past, shows him their works, and cautions Alexander that he alone can create his own artistic future. All the beauty of the past is not his to hold on to, but inspiration to work from, encouragement to give life to new great things.
Sophia is the mathematician from the day she meets Charlie, from the moment that Larry sees lights behind her eyes as he's never seen before as she and Charlie talk of his work. He tells her stories of growing up as a young mathematician, and the future he sees with his maths and with the mathematical community as a whole. At the conclusion of their conversation, he even offers to tutor her.
Larry observes that the lights behind Charlie's eyes are brighter too, filled with a new hope.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Alexander brings home a lovely girl for Larry to meet when he's sixteen. Nia is his age, professes wanting to become a doctor one day, and is in love with his photography.
During a doctor's visit that year, Sophia shares her worries about if she'll ever have a relationship, if she can have children, if anyone can ever love her.
Her doctor and Larry both reassure her that having HIV doesn't mean she can't fall in love, get married, or have children of her own, and that someone will come along in her life who will see beyond the stigma and love her. The first of several sex talks finally comes around, giving her the tools she needs to make safe decisions as she grows up.
Charlie and Amita have their first child a year later, a daughter. The three of them all visit many times after the birth, Sophia especially falling in love with her mentor's beautiful child.
Larry's students come and go, his research progresses, his children climb towards adulthood.
Larry thinks that although it isn't the conventional story of how falling in love, getting married, and raising children goes, their story is a pretty good one too.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
- Khalil Gibran
Alexander marries Nia when he's nineteen, in a small ceremony in Larry's back yard. Larry sees his son off on this next stage in his life, imagines what the future might bring as they move to New York in pursuit of Alexander's career.
Larry gazes up at the stars and says a quiet prayer of thanks to the universe that created his child and brought them together.
Sophia lives at home during her undergraduate years, before deciding to pursue her doctorate at MIT. It's bittersweet, sending his last child off.
Larry and Megan reconnect a couple of years after Sophia leaves. Larry thinks, but never says, that perhaps the reason that life took them apart all those years ago was so that he could have the children that Megan never wanted.
Life brings the growth of Alexander and Nia's careers, and Sophia's graduation. It brings Nia becoming a haematologist, and Alexander's pictures in magazine articles and hanging off of gallery walls. It takes Sophia to research and teach a new generation of mathematicians.
It brings Charlie and Amita another daughter and a son, and brings Don and Ian hesitantly together.
It takes Alan suddenly one night.
It gives Larry three grandchildren after Sophia finds her love.
It finally takes Larry years later, in his bed, surrounded by the people who loved him most. Larry thinks of the universe swallowing him back up, re-purposing all of the energy which gave him life, and of rejoining the stars. He goes, happy, content.