Thoughts that don't make sense...ack

[scousepie]

I don't really know where to go with what's in my head at the minute...so I tried writing it down. Does this make any sense?






Sent from my iPhone



protip: you are probably, honestly, not afraid of dying.

Really. I have spent far more time thinking about and talking about the natureand consequences of death than is seemly for a girl of my age and credit score. When I have not been preoccupied with rebuffing death's leery drunken advances

(cold breath on my neck: come on/you are worthless/crazy/bad/guilty/stupid/vile...i can take all this away/i can take you away/and let that space around you knit together)

I have been, or so I hope, sitting on the other shoulder of (he/she/it?)'s many targets shooting down endless speculations on how it feels and what happens after and what a given deity would think of it. Some of these people were making a choice.Some of them had all their choices suddenly staring down a much reduced future.nBut I don't think the why and wherefor are what any of them, or you, really wondered or feared.

I think what we fear is what we will leave behind us. Or that we won't leave anything of consequence behind.

(what if for all the air you breathe and all the noise you make/you change nothing/you leave nothing/you are gone and the space fills itself/and no mark left)

At twenty, I was fortunate to never have been left behind. Everyone I had loved, or at least had a conscious memory of having loved, was still alive in various states of repair. I was not so much a woman as a grown up girl, and I had never lost anything I had really needed to mourn.

and then,quite suddenly, I was pregnant.

Some context: this was not, ever, supposed to happen to me. I had only recently disentangled myself from serving as a kind of sporadic sexual comfort blanket to the girl I fell for when I was seventeen. I thought I was at least getting out with some truth about who I was. Then there was a boy. He had blue eyes and a crooked smile and an Idlewild setlist on his bedroom wall and I loved him like fireworks, like Christmas when you're seven. And he kissed me and who I was stopped being a question and I only knew I was beautiful.

and there's a song I only half remember about sparks flying and landing as explosions, and some little spark of us ignited and lit and danced through my veins and my breath and crackled on my tongue and raced away in the dark while I slept and wrote and worked

and we thought we were careful/and this isn't the right time/and we have too much to lose/and we're too young/and you know you have choices/you fought for them/you thought you could choose so easily/and I don't want to do this/and this isn't just your choice/and this is just as much my decision as yours

and yet, and yet

I slept and I spat out metal and I argued with the boy and I sat, sick and sore and enthralled, and I read that at six weeks a foetal heart can't be heard because it comprises one chamber which beats 150 times a minute, twice as fast as my own treacherous heart

and I thought I would cry with the awe of knowing this,with the magic that raced away inside me

and I thought (god help me/someone save me/but I think I choose this)

oh my beautiful boy, this is not me, and it is not you. It is both of us and neither of us and it is everything and nothing and it is love and indifference and it is awful and wonderful

everyday magic/proof of things not seen/a letter to the world that I loved you and you me

I said: we don't have to do anything right now
he said: I was kind of hoping it was a mistake and you had cancer or something

and then
one day I was sure I was going to die
my friend took me to the hospital and sat outside and they said: no.no, it's not you who died.

When I felt like the hospital would fall down on my head I signed myself out and went home at 2am and called my boy, who because it was the right thing tried not to let me hear his relief

Most people never knew at all, but when the people who did know heard, they asked and I smiled and said, yes, yes I'm ok, thank you (because really, this is better/this is the right thing/this is a fuss over nothing/this wasn't a baby/this isn't a death)

The boy's mother said: but you know you couldn't have kept it
My mother said: nothing. Not a word. Not a look. Nothing.

My mother is a very damaged woman. I was born to mend the cracks in her self, and of course I couldn't, and she loves and hates me with equal ferocity. To keep myself safe from her pain, I decided when I was young that I would be her daughter, but I would keep myself a stranger to her.

I said if I ever had a child, and I was fairly sure I would not, I would never allow them to be a stranger to me

(oh little stranger, I am so, so sorry)

I went looking for information/solace/both, shortly afterwards, when I couldn?t quite process that my entire life had turned on this point and now it was just gone. It seems a lot of people do a lot of talking about angels and heaven when they lose babies. Maybe it helps them. I hope so. But see I can?t just pick up something like that when I need comfort. I don?t believe in God. I believe in people and music and basic decency and books and that these are the things that can save your life. I?m not going to heaven. So for me to entertain the image that I now had a perfect little angel sitting on a nice cloud in a beautiful place, I would have to reconcile this with the knowledge that I would never be there. I don?t go much further into the theology of the thing

(because I have to admit I still believe/somewhere in my lizard brain/that this baby only ever existed to punish me

because I?m not a good enough person

I?ve never been good enough

and it?s too much to hope you?ll never have to answer for it)



and there is no heaven/no grave/no person/nothing but my pathetic brain going over and over



gone

gone

gone



you know something weird?



I went on and I went about my life and I began thinking maybe I dreamed it, maybe it was a mistake but all the while I did, for the whole nine months, I felt a dead weight out in front of me. An actual physical force taking up that space. I would bend at the waist and think (but that's not right) then I would realise and I would think (stop this/crazy bitch)



I lay on my bed with the boy with my head over his beating heart and this ghost in me/in the space between us



Little stranger, let me tell you something:

I don?t believe in God. I don?t believe people go anywhere when they die, and I don?t think they float around in the ether waiting to talk to some douche like John Edward. For me, it?s about what you leave behind you. What survives of you is the effect that your life had on other people. And why I could never really reconcile myself with this, why I tortured myself with heaven and hell and all the other crap was because I didn?t see how someone who was basically just my little secret for a few weeks could have made any imprint on the world. I created a whole child with someone I loved and to everyone but me it makes no odds that that child died.

So I figure the ripples you made will have to be from me. I was changed. The boy cannot possibly have avoided it, and he will have children, he will have more children with someone else and I?m sure it will affect how he parents them and how he appreciates them. I hope it helps him. And I?m left at the end of it with the memory of how awe inspiring it was to have this, this little spark that ignited, this one chamber heart that beat too fast to hear, with me in the dark, with me as we crossed a bridge and I whispered inside myself pay attention, little thing, this is where your father lives. I didn?t ever think I?d get to know how that felt.

Later I crossed that bridge every day to get to work, and every day that memory stabbed me a little.

I want that to mean something.

So the mark youleft on me is going to have to change the marks I leave behind me. I?m not sure how that?s going to work.

I find that awe now, the imprint you little spark made on my memory

in songs

in places

in other people?s words

in memories of everything that happened before and after and in things I never knew would happen.

From this I?m going to have to conjure up some lasting proof that my little stranger existed. And that you mattered.

There is a tree, in a forest near where I am now. It was supposed to be an ash tree, because if you surround your baby with ash twigs the faeiries cannot magic them away, and by some magic I still want to keep you safe, safer than I actually could.

It had to be a hazel tree, and I felt I'd let you down (again/still)

but

hazel wood is enchanted. Hazel wood contains power and knowledge and insipration.

Hazel wood used to be protected under law that said it must only be used for magic.

It is everyday magic, like you.

It will be there when I am gone and my memory with me

It is not enough, and I hope you will forgive me



but know this, my little stranger:



you are not lost

[Bakingtins]

It does make sense, scousepie and it's a fitting tribute to your baby. Maybe you should try to get it published somewhere a bit more permanent ( try the miscarriage association)
It's v common to feel, with your lizard brain, that a miscarriage happened because you weren't good enough to be a mother. Make sure you remind yourself with your forebrain that this is not true.
I also have a hazel tree as a memorial to the second baby I lost, though I came to it from a very different perspective (the writings of Julian of Norwich) I hope it brings you some comfort, and that writing all that has been cathartic.
If you can take such a sad experience and bring something positive from it that's very commendable and your baby's short life was not in vain.