if it even exists at all; I just couldn't consciously kill it, nor carry it for 9 months and hand it away.
Oh, Shae. I shouldn't mention a damn thing until I'm left with no doubt, absolute petrifying certainty, that I've got half of a him bubbling in my belly. But always, the "How are you?" prompts the urge of spitting, "Nervous as a virgin on her wedding night."
Woke up this morning, 6 am, from a dream of Tristan, unremembered and hazy. Him smiling is all I can recall in my foggy alcohol-addled brain, grinning with that incorrigible smile, eyes lit, alive. Happy. Because I'm there, sitting across from him.
A dream Saturday night, of Babar the elephant I couldn't get enough of in my early childhood, a storybook of his antics and a small, raven-curled, tan-freckled little girl. Her tiny little chubby frame, warm like only a young child can be, curled in against my shoulder, teeny tiny legs and feet across my lap. She is mine, but she looks like Shae, too. I tell him of it, he grins his winning teenage-boy stretch of muscle: "Sounds like genetics."
The next night, he sleeps and sees a little black-headed girl running around a yard with a patio, me on a bench under his arm. "Hayley," he remembers calling to her. So, Hayley.
There's great affection in my heart for Shae, I love him in some vaguely romantic way, care for him; something blocks a flash flood. Realizing that since the night Tristan told me about Kirsten I've only felt my heart beating after running, swimming. The ...thud...thud you can sometimes hear as you fall asleep, even, has vanished.
I can't tell if I just refuse to hear it, to feel it, in some attempt to forget I have a heart that is consistently breaking, slowly, the same five or six pieces being chipped away; the rest feel like they heal almost completely by the time the chisel comes down again.
Oh, Shae. I shouldn't mention a damn thing until I'm left with no doubt, absolute petrifying certainty, that I've got half of a him bubbling in my belly. But always, the "How are you?" prompts the urge of spitting, "Nervous as a virgin on her wedding night."
Woke up this morning, 6 am, from a dream of Tristan, unremembered and hazy. Him smiling is all I can recall in my foggy alcohol-addled brain, grinning with that incorrigible smile, eyes lit, alive. Happy. Because I'm there, sitting across from him.
A dream Saturday night, of Babar the elephant I couldn't get enough of in my early childhood, a storybook of his antics and a small, raven-curled, tan-freckled little girl. Her tiny little chubby frame, warm like only a young child can be, curled in against my shoulder, teeny tiny legs and feet across my lap. She is mine, but she looks like Shae, too. I tell him of it, he grins his winning teenage-boy stretch of muscle: "Sounds like genetics."
The next night, he sleeps and sees a little black-headed girl running around a yard with a patio, me on a bench under his arm. "Hayley," he remembers calling to her. So, Hayley.
There's great affection in my heart for Shae, I love him in some vaguely romantic way, care for him; something blocks a flash flood. Realizing that since the night Tristan told me about Kirsten I've only felt my heart beating after running, swimming. The ...thud...thud you can sometimes hear as you fall asleep, even, has vanished.
I can't tell if I just refuse to hear it, to feel it, in some attempt to forget I have a heart that is consistently breaking, slowly, the same five or six pieces being chipped away; the rest feel like they heal almost completely by the time the chisel comes down again.
