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[May. 17th, 2008|04:36 pm] |
My breasts are firm, and my stomach is so soft. It disturbs me; my child is dead.
Even giving birth I expected a squirming wriggling life. Such a tiny body that could not possibly contain everything my child is, was, will be. He smelled like Kevin, this little new body smell that sneaks in under Kevin's ears, at his mouth. When he sleeps and isn't smoky, I wake in the night and can't quite bury my face into his hair anymore, where the tobacco smell always lingers. I just want my baby. My body has been in constant need for it; my breasts are swollen, leaking little baby meals into my shirt. Where are the tiny lips I've expected, with the soft pink tongue? Where are the little fingers, toes and breath? Where is the crying, mid-slumber disturbance; I wake up crying myself. It's just all wrong.
How do you begin to explain that to someone who's never been filled up with life? This sudden emptiness or the loneliness, the missing body, how do you communicate the desire for human contact so specific to everyone who were only just seeing this as real, the beginning of my stomach protruding. This life that I've felt in my body for months: the hovering awareness someone else is in the room, within my stomach, filling me up. It's surreal, I feel alien in my own skin. I function on autopilot, moving through myself without notice.
I have small moments, glimpses of realizations that there is so much I've held on to, so much that will never be meaningful again. I lie in bed with my lover, we speak of snapshots- as he calls them, moments we will never lose: waking up and knowing this life has started in me, fighting, bleeding, hospital white, hospital dark and mattress, bloody water; our baby in it's sack, in my arms, hands, at my chest. The fragile way Kevin held his son, all of his overwhelming pallid skin contrasting with baby's vivaciousviolentscreaming fuschiapurplered body; the irony of how lifeless we look in pictures they've taken compared to the unmoving child in our arms. Humans are made in such bright colours. I have hideous memories of tiny, swimming, pastel outfits they gave us. Warnings, desires not to let other's see their babies made up in such disastrous palettes; not let their memories be distorted in hazy views of violent and empty hues, exact contours, wrinkles and shadows that don't match any thought they've ever been able to conceive.
How do you get angry at people who believe the way to healing is through distraction? I am thankful, I am miserable. I'm just as overwhelmed in my child's death as with his life. It's unbelievably hard. There is free-falling, I'm uncreated as if everything that tied me to this world began in my cunt. Tomorrow will be one week, one week since my stomach felt knotted and swollen, since no kicks and too much blood. There was a funeral this afternoon, nothing about it was right. Kevin cut and dug out the grave, cleaned the edges and set aside rocks. It rained the ten minutes our little families collided together outside, behind the church; stopping shortly after. My brother walking toward me in black, dreads tucked away, emptying soil onto the grave. Dirty hands slipping into pockets, pointing out a saved stone -holding my hand as we walk home. Finding myself between two mother's who've never experienced this, father's with intense stares. We are blessed with caring people and cursed with needing them. |
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nyghtinggail's journal
