Then, I saw her:

I looked into the mirror. I saw my reflection. It was a good one, as usual. Handsome. Fit. Unchanged for years. Six months had passed since a girl first told me she was pregnant. For six months I had known I was going to be “a dad”. In six months, she had said, I would become a dad – whether I wanted to be one or not. I kept looking in the mirror. I didn’t look like a “dad”. I certainly didn’t feel like a “dad”. My reflection proved I was a young gym enthusiast, who regularly went to the barbershop, ate healthy, and took care of myself. I looked good for the girls, but really, it was all for me. Every day I made sure I looked presentable. Today, I would continue my routine like any other day. After showering, I shaved, using an icy aftershave because I liked the stinging, fresh sensation. I moisturized my face with an expensive cream praised by some celebrity all the girls had on their “list”. I treated my hair with fashionable, well-smelling wax I knew girls liked to get between their fingers on a night out. I put on a perfume that would make me smell like an alpha male. Yes, today was no different. Not for me, anyway. I looked at my phone. The text message I had been ignoring all morning was still on my screen. The girl who sent it had informed me that her water had broken, and she was in hospital about to give birth. I could see the name of the hospital, and the beginning of the ward she was in, without opening the text. I pictured the water breaking. Gross. I had no idea what that even meant. Only once did I ever watch a chick-flick movie with someone having a baby, and their water breaking. That was the last time I ever watched a chick-flick for the sake of getting a girl. I put my phone down. I had thrown myself off by picturing what the girl would like while “breaking her water”. She was probably sweaty. And not in the good way, like she had been with me that one time. I looked back up in the mirror. I was far from off-putting, unlike some knocked-up nineteen year-old chick. I was twenty-three, but looked sixteen. I had a boyish smile girls liked, but I also had wide shoulders, and masculine hands – of a significant size. I looked at my hands. They were the kind every girl wanted on their body. Some girls wanted to hold them. I hated when they wanted to hold them. I could touch them pretty much everywhere, except palm-to-palm, finger-between-finger. The pregnant girl was the type to try handholding with me, but miraculously, she refrained such urges if she had them. I never blamed the girls, I had solid hands. Who wouldn’t want to be held by them. But handholding was never on my menu. And it wouldn’t be one now. My palms were clammy from the thought of handholding. I was suddenly stressed. She probably wanted me to hold the kid she was giving birth to at this very morning hour, I suddenly thought. I looked away from my hands. I looked into the mirror instead. My reflection quickly calmed me. Made my hands cool. I put on a smirk for my reflection, revealing a pair of charming dimples. Today was going to be like every other day. I looked at my Rolex. If I didn’t put on my Levi’s jeans and my light blue Ralph Lauren shirt, which I had carefully planned the day in advance, I would be late for breakfast. 

Breakfast meant coffee at a mainstream coffee house where the girls would frequently look my way. Coffee houses like these were usually reserved for bookish types and hipsters – everything I was not. I was the jock surrounded by nerds. Girls would therefore notice me, and couldn’t stop themselves from looking twice or thrice. I usually sat in the window corner to best observe girls walking past the coffee house in their tight jeans, as well as the girls sitting inside, sipping their trendy coffees with seasonal flavours. I usually brought my work laptop in order to seem important. I usually rolled up the sleeves of my shirt, and un-buttoned the top buttons to show some skin. I usually made eye-contact with at least one girl, using at least one double-take glance. If our eye-contact session exceeded three seconds, I would do my half-smirk, before looking down on my screen for a second before meeting her gaze again. Usually, they would blush, and I would know I wasn’t loosing touch, that I still had “game”. Today, I sat in the corner, like usual. I opened my laptop and looked over some sales I had accomplished so far during the week, like usual. I rolled up my sleeves like usual, and the top buttons were un-buttoned, like usual. Today was going to be just like any other day. A typical day for a single bachelor with all the time in the world, and no particular burdens weighing me down. No commitments. No obligation. No one who needed me. Free. To others, this lifestyle might seem sad. The pregnant girl had used that word to describe my life, around the four-month mark. “Sad”. I never answered a single text. I was busy having fun. Living life. I even went on one of my week-long trips to some well-known holiday destination to see what other girls were like. With nothing or no one weighing me down. Suddenly I realized I had been frowning for a while, my eyebrows had tightened my entire face. Now, I was back to today. I remembered, I was on a mission. Without shifting my gaze from the screen, I tilted my head up, and managed to scan the room for today’s distance flirt. This was a technique which pointed me to where I should spend my actual gaze in the search of a girl with the right...details, worth looking into. I pretended to scratch my neck, tilting my head to my left, without looking away from the screen. No one in particular stood out amongst the blurry background. I tilted my head straight ahead again, still looking down at my screen. Nothing. I tried tilting my head to my right, but no one stood out in this direction either. I had to actually look at the girls. How desperate. I decided to focus on my sales. Edited in some details. As I scrolled over them, I remembered my costumers purchasing these cars from me. I remembered a brown eyed girl. She was engaged, but looked at me a few seconds longer than necessary, and giggled at jokes I made that weren’t even funny. I didn’t even try with her, but she still couldn’t help herself from gushing. Thinking about it gave me a sense of confidence I didn’t get from my regular morning hipster-audience. I remembered another one of my recent sales. A cougar. I sold her an old school-looking car by leaning close to her with one elbow on the roof of the car, and when I spoke to her about horse power, I kept side-eyeing the backseat. It was cheesy, but the slight suggestion that I would have a woman like her in the back of a car like that, paid my bills and then some. My train of thought was interrupted when something caught another type of sense, something, in which my eyes had failed to detect. A loud noise filled the room, breaking the light clinking of cups and sipping of coffee. It was an untamed, almost savage, sound. A child. Someone had brought a child into the coffee house. A place meant for pretentious business chatter and cliché gazes, now tainted by the sound of a toddler. My eyes found the source of the noise. For the first time since I entered the room, I looked out in the crowd. Unlike any other day, I didn’t look at a girl with daddy issues, I looked at a child. My palms felt damp again. The child smiled. For no apparent reason. The noise was laughter. Unruly, wide-mouthed laughter. The only proper detail I managed to notice before looking away, was how wet the child’s nose was. Gross. Breakfast was ruined. 

As I walked a few blocks to a familiar sports pub, I noticed how people had started to bring their children everywhere. Anywhere meant for adults. Adults with a sense of elegance, rather than the wish to change an infant’s diaper. Admittedly, these were places I had never felt at home at. My comfort zone had been clubs, pubs, and parties on different locations, rather than sites of “culture”. Unless one acknowledged dating culture as a valid culture, in which case I had been partly interested, since I was fifteen. Still, it vexed me to see people bringing children into such places adults wanted to escape to. Luckily; my turf was still safe. My happy-place remained closed for anyone under the age of eighteen. Or sixteen, depending on your skills as a forger of identification papers. Certainly, no snotty nose would be accepted at my turf. Unless the girl who managed to get herself pregnant, had started a trend. Unless she would start bringing her kid into her former roaming areas, and spoil the clubs. My fist clenched the stress case containing my work laptop. The free arm also clenched. It wouldn’t be possible for her, or any other cheerleader-type girl in trouble to bring their suckling into a club. I came to a full stop. I damned this day. Today wasn’t like any other day. Today, my head was somewhere it had never been before. Today, my head noticed children in places they had probably been coming in and out of for a while. Today, I despised laughter. Genuine, raw, and honest laughter. Today, some girl I didn’t bother to learn the name of, even after she told me she was pregnant, was in hospital. I wanted today to be like usual days. I didn’t want this day to be the day some girl made some sort of claim on me – and my resources – because she was sloppy on her pills once. I refused for this day to be any different from any day. In my phone, the pregnant girl was still saved under “Sunday 6”, as we danced our way into my studio apartment on the sixth day of one or another month. I took her number in case I needed a confidence booster in the future. I used to love Sundays. Comfort drinking fancy drinks and chatting up girls reluctant to face the coming of the week, was my usual Sunday. But after the girl from the sixth day had told be she was pregnant, Sundays started to slowly frustrate me, until they were as hated by me as any other working man. I truly detested Sundays, and the fact that the most bothersome text messages I had ever received, had been sent by someone labelled “Sunday 6”, didn’t ease my thoughts on Sundays whenever I received such a text. Even now, at the top of my screen, an un-opened text forced my screen to display the name. My Sundays were not the same as usual. But my familiar bar seemed to be. I had been standing outside my destination for quite some while. I decided to walk in the same way I always had done; with my head held high, arms a bit out from my body, and with a stride proving I carried something legitimizing my cockiness. I was in my element; a sports bar was just the place for a jock-type like me. And the girls would notice me. 

The bar was owned by one of my mates; like me, he chased skirts. As I walked in, he greeted me with a couple of raised eyebrows, and a deep nod. I gave him a short nod back. He then made a discreet head gesture towards a section of the bar, before rolling his eyes and exhaled briefly. A girl. I turned in the direction he had gestured. I saw her right away. Or rather; I saw her details. A tight, white shirt brought them out nicely. I quickly looked back at my friend. His tip was right on. I felt relieved. I felt comfortable. I felt like myself again. Maybe today would still turn out like any other day. Another day where I wasn’t about to be a “dad”. Maybe I was still me. I decided I would stay for lunch at the bar. I heard my friend say something about twins, and something about a to-do list. Before I knew it, I had a sister on each side of me. Their over-filled lips moved, so I knew they were chatting, but I had no idea what about. Probably some new TV show with a hot guy in the lead. I didn’t care. I wasn’t part of the conversation the three of them engaged in. I looked at the girls, without actually seeing anything. Out of nowhere, one of the twins stroke one of her fingers over my hand. It woke me up. I didn’t know what she was doing. Was she lost? Did she need me to grab her by the hand and lead her home? The sudden touch was off-putting. And I moved my hand. By instinct, it went in the pocket of my jeans, and grasped my phone. I pretended to check for notifications to loose her eager. Usually, I only did this with girls I found ugly. But today I found myself in need for such a diversion in the presence of a girl of average looks. As I scrolled on my phone screen, the text from the earliest hours almost caught me off-guard. I put the phone back in the pocket, grabbed my lunch beer and finished the last mouthful, before making up an excuse about having to drop off some papers at my office. Then I left. As I was leaving, my friend yelled something about going to a night club near by for drinks later. Without turning back, I gave him a high thumbs-up. I looked at my Rolex. It wasn’t lunchtime anymore, it was dinnertime. Getting a cab anywhere would be hard because of rush hour, so I decided to walk. I just didn’t know where to. So I just started walking nowhere.  

But when I got there, it felt misplaced. I found myself outside my favourite, yet affordable upscale restaurant. I looked inside the windows, and I saw families enjoying dishes not suited for messy, clumsy children’s hands. And so I walked somewhere else. But there were noises of scrubbed knees, dropped ice creams, funny balloon-shapes, there too. I wondered if any place was safe. The sky were filled with colours, telling me this day would not be unusual for much longer. It would be over. A new day would arrive while I was in the club, dancing close to somebody not interested in holding my hand, or giving birth to my child. 

I didn’t enter the night club. The sun had set at one point, and the day would soon be over. And I was probably a dad. I pulled out my phone. I opened the text. 

Next thing I knew, a nurse showed me to a room filled with everything I had been running from all day. And all previous days, for the last six months. The not-so-pregnant girl was asleep, and the nurses showed me directly to a room filled with box-like beds with blue or pink blankets. The nurse stopped by a bed with a pink blanket. 

Then, I saw her. I stared at this tiny lady, sleeping peacefully. I couldn’t look away. I noticed how small her hands were. I slowly reached for the wristband. The tag read “Sunday Dean Mayweather”. The last name had to be her mother’s. The middle one, was mine. The first one, was my daughter’s. Sunday. What a perfect, beautiful name, I thought. That’s when my daughter decided to grab my hand. Or at least what she could hold; one of my fingers. Her eyes opened. She looked at me. She noticed me. For minutes, we just stared at each other. Both in equal disbelief, it seemed.  

“Would you like to hold her?” the nurse asked me.

“I’m scared”, I heard myself say out loud. It was true. 

“You’ll get the hang of it”, the nurse assured me. 

I took my daughter in my arms. Never had I been more scared than this very moment of this day. I held her head. I damned myself for not remembering what her mother’s hair looked like, to compare. I would talk to Sunday’s mother in the morning. Right now, at the end of the day, I just wanted to watch over my daughter. She was so beautiful. Her face held soft yet strong features already. And even though I couldn’t see her true eye colour yet, I could tell they would be loving and magnificent. She was stunning. More beautiful than the temples of Dendera in Egypt, dedicated to the goddess Hathor, because the world could crumble under my daughter's will faster than it did under Hathor. I decided there and then, that my daughter would never lack anything. From this day, she had my respect. My admiration. My love. At this late hour, I knew I loved Sunday, and I knew I would continue to love Sunday until the day I'd die.  

“I will take you anywhere you want to go”, I told my daughter. “I will hold you by your hand, and I will guide you wherever you want to go”. 

And just as the last minute of the day ran out, I realized: 

Today, I changed.