The Never-Weres

Sometimes when I look at just the right angle, I can see her. I can remember her. Is it a real memory, though? I imagine there are rules about that. But rules never really suited her.

The edges are fuzzy - out of focus. She dances just out of my eye line, like a bright dot that appears on my eyelids whenever I close them.

The first few times I saw her, she was so little: preciously breakable. Little arms wiggled. Little toes curled. A little mouth pursed.

As the years have passed, though, she has grown. Sometimes I kept pace with her; other times she leapt years forward and backward. My mind was her time machine and she poked at the buttons and tugged on the levers easily.

Once, when I went to the ocean, the waves lapping against my wiggling toes, I couldn’t help but think of her.

“I think you’d love it here,” I had said, letting the salt-dipped air whisk away the words.

And then she was there, diving into the crashing waves before they curled with white suds over the top and smashed against the shore.

“I wonder what you’d look like now,” I had whispered, cocking my head to the side as I calculated the years. She would have been almost 8 that summer. Her smile would probably have been dented by missing teeth. Little freckles would probably have sprinkled her cheeks, just like mine do in the sun. I imagined her eyes being the perfect shade of green with flecks of gold - like his.

I shook my head then, trying to dislodge his face from making too solid of an imprint - before it could sink into the soft foam of my memory. That was a dangerous path - one full of sharp rocks and hard turns. His image was a landmine that I had developed a habit of delicately stepping around.

Now, as my stomach swelled, the bean inside older than she’d ever truly be, I couldn’t stop picturing her. She’d have been just over 12 this year - is that sixth grade? Or seventh? A tween. A skin full of hormones. A middle schooler… and yet, she was none of those things.

I hadn’t yet been able to come around to naming the life swimming within me now. Before, I had named her - and only a few days later, she… Yes, a name was a precipice I wasn’t to step over. A name had power - just ask Rumplestiltskin.

This time hadn’t been that different. The missed period - the fear - followed by joy. That first trimester had attempted to empty me out as the morning sickness had hung on me like humidity on a midwest summer day. The second trimester, I had started to barely show. What was she then? The size of a kumquat? What an odd thing we do as humans - measure the size of babies as random food items. As if anyone wants to really think about chomping into the baby like you bite into an apple - skin and all.

This time, the biggest difference was the never-ending paranoia. I was sure I was going to sit incorrectly or cough too hard or eat the wrong thing and she would go the way of her sister - just - gone. And all that would be left in my womb would be regret and guilt and shame. And a lack of answers.

Oh, people had questions - they always had questions. Things to ask - things to know - ways to stab into you with tiny knives in the shape of question marks.

Rubbing my belly, I wondered - will I still see her? The almost daughter. The could-have-beens. The never-weres.

I hope that I will.

I hope.

Hope.