A Lost Art

I've been reading my old xanga entries, and wow, I used to write a lot.  Granted, I was young and anguished as young people often are, but I was also creative, spontaneous, and funny.  Where did that go?  Whatever happened to the quirky dialogues I used to write for no particular characters?  They may not have been brilliant, but they still draw laughs from me, egotistical as that may be.

It feels like my mind is one big empty space where it used to overflow with people and places and ideas.  I was always writing, always daydreaming, always somewhere else.  Now all I think about it knitting, because it keeps me away from the dark places in my head, because it keeps me from crying.

I want to cry, desperately.  Every minute that I let my thoughts go, they invariably return to that cold little body that I didn't get to hold for long enough.  My beautiful, broken boy.  I'm sad and angry and ashamed.  It's just a stillbirth, right?  Get over it and have another baby.

I don't want another baby, I want Gabriel.  I want the son I felt moving inside me for all those months.  He was so alive, so active, so . . . real.

I keep coming back to that word.  He was so real.  I had to stop myself several times in the hospital from saying, "He looks so real, he's like a real baby, he feels so real."  Like I was holding a doll.  It, the situation that is, didn't feel real to me.  This wasn't a baby, it was a body.  Of course it's my baby, look, he has my hair, my chin, my nose.  Look at how big his feet are, no wonder those kicks were so strong.  But . . . he wasn't quite real.  There was no soul in that body.  Whatever it was that was Gabriel was gone already, had been gone for three days, if not more.  All that was left was a shell, a corpse.  And we all smiled through our tears and pretended like he was real, like I was holding something more than a dead body.  And I talked to it, and cuddled it, and kissed it, and where was he?  In Heaven, of course, but was he watching?  If there are no tears in Heaven, what did he feel, what did he think when he watched his mother sobbing over a piece of meat?

What does he think now, when I still can't stop crying when I think about him, even though he's in the most wonderful place, in the Presence of God, and I selfishly want him back on earth where there is all this pain and suffering, fear and hatred, and . . .

Kittens.

Are there kittens in Heaven?  Does Gabriel understand the joy of kittens?  Are there trees?  Is there ice cream?

I'm torn between Heaven and earth, and I don't know how to move.

I don't want to move.  Every day, every minute, I'm moving farther and farther from the time when he was alive.  I have to, because I'm human, and I'm mortal, and I'm subject to Time.

Someday, I will have to do this all again.  As everyone so helpfully reminds me, I'm very young.  I have a good ten or more years of healthy childbearing ahead of me.  I'm in love with my husband, and such love bears fruit.  I'll get pregnant again, and somehow I have to bear up through it to the end without succumbing to a fearful paralysis of losing another baby.  And when that curse is broken, what next?

I'll just do the best I can, and miss him always.